The Hall of Broken Mirrors
by Kyou-chan2
Summary: On the eve of the year 1993, Seishirou encounters Subaru by chance. But he is soon drawn into a mystery which profoundly affects them both and threatens even destiny. SxS, post TB, preX1999
1. Renewal

Disclaimer: (folds arms angrily) Nooo…I don't own X or TB. And I never will because of CLAMP's 'cease and desist' order…

More Disclaimers That Will Probably Save Me Time Later:

Hey everyone! I'm Kyou-chan2 (formerly known as Kakyou-chan and Kakyouluverx) and I like the X/1999 and TB fandom. I've been wanting to write this story badly. Really, really badly. And now that the voices telling me to do this have driven me to a breaking point (and I caught a break from college) I'm doing just that.

This story is SeishirouxSubaru and may possibly have male on male bonking. If that offends, go away and play with the tolerance sock puppet. This is a post-TB story BUT there will eventually be themes from X/1999 so that's why it's here in the X/1999 section. Lastly, I love this fandom and its readers which is why I can never seem to go away for good.

So thank you and enjoy my story!

**The Hall of Broken Mirrors**

**I. Renewal**

Shadows masked the glow of golden light as they flickered under the brisk footsteps of their master. The street lights were dim and sparse in the deteriorated neighborhood, the darkness creeping into its bowels. _This was the underworld of Tokyo_, mused the man as he swaggered down a ruined, snow-covered sidewalk. Yet it was the desolate darkness that was ideal for business.

The man's secret meeting had concluded a good half hour ago, and he would have already been home to his extravagant house and a shot of bourbon if it were not for the distinct feeling that he was being watched. It began only minutes after his colleagues had vanished back into the night. He had almost disappeared himself when, deep in his chest, he felt a tickle of paranoia. He felt eyes focus on him with great intensity.

At first, he was quick to dismiss the feeling or, at most, speculate that he had caught the curious gaze of the homeless riffraff. He assured himself that whoever was watching—if there was in fact anyone there in the darkness and cold—would lose interest in him.

But the feeling only deepened in the pit of the man's stomach, and panic burst through him as he considered that he was being spied upon. If this were so, he would be subject to endless blackmail, or even worse, total ruin of his career, his reputation—everything that he had.

He had to salvage whatever he could from this situation, and so the man turned up the collar of his expensive tweed jacket, and abandoned the slippery sidewalk for a fresh blanket of snow that led into a labyrinth of alleys. He hurried through the empty narrows as fast as he could so that even he became disoriented by his movements. He was sure that his escape into the snowy alleys of a treacherous neighborhood would deter any man who was set to destroy him, but his pursuer was more persistent and clever than any enemy he had publicly encountered.

It was not long before the man could only force himself forward in exhausted bursts of speed. Between his labored breaths, the man heard a sudden crash of junk metal nearby, which was enough to cause him to trip under his own feet. That instant of fear brought to light the true nature of what the horrid feeling in his gut was, and with it came a new wave terror.

He was being hunted.

His pursuer's aim was not to ruin his career but to take his life. The man scrambled to his feet, and winced at the twisted ankle he had just suffered from the fall. He ignored the pain and limped forward like an injured animal. His breathing turned into frantic gasps and cries of pain and exhaustion, and although his mind refused to acknowledge it, his body would not go on.

Just when it seemed hopeless for the man, who was close to collapsing in the snow, the presence of his pursuer vanished. His feeling of being hunted abruptly dissipated. The man opened his mouth to let out a withered laugh, and his eyes teared up with relief.

It was too late for him when he noticed a shadow eclipsing him.

"Good evening, Minister," a smooth, empty and disturbingly indifferent voice rang behind him.

The greeting was followed by the sickening lurch of his vitals being torn and his chest cavity ripped open to the cold. Air escaped his throat in a perforated groan and with horror, he looked down to see white fingertips emerge from his front like a knife's tip. The man went blind with pain and his mouth overflowed with blood laced with the bitter taste of sakura. He was suffocated by that sweet, horrid taste of death.

Sakurazuka Seishirou held the corpse tightly until he felt the last pulse of life fade between his fingers. He then pulled out his hand from the man's punctured heart and watched the limp body crumple into the snow. The Minister of Japan's interior lied dead at his feet. Yet such a high profile kill gave him neither a feeling of self-satisfied power nor any thoughts of remorse, only a faint twitch of irritation.

The Minister had been selling government secrets to crime lords for the better part of a year, and his indiscretions, once a normal part of any country's dirty politics, had progressed to threatening Japan's national security. He had been caught, tried and found guilty by a jury of the highest government officials, all of this business of course kept secret from the perpetrator. Whether or not the Minister's fate was justice did not matter to Seishirou—as Sakurazukamori, his part in this dance of government secrecy was the executioner, and as such, his efforts were a form of art.

The Minister's death was poorly executed, although it was not entirely his fault. He could have never guessed that his victim was exceptionally sensitive to his power. A victim never realized that he was hunting them until they had his hand in their chest and blood on their lips. Nevertheless, he should have adapted at the first sign that the Minister had sensed him. _Mistake number one_, he mused to himself.

The second of his errors was less forgivable. When the Minister fled, he had little choice but to follow after. Yet when turning a sharp corner, he collided directly into a stack of garbage cans. He hated to admit it, but the loss of his right eye greatly reduced his judgment of distances and depth perception.

He thought that he had evolved past the point of clumsily stumbling into things, but his lack of focus tonight was inexcusable to him. It had been a year and a half since his accident, and it frustrated him that he could not adjust from such a meaningless loss over that long amount of time.

Overhead, the air sung with the melody of nearby church bells. It was fifteen 'till midnight on December 31st, and although the New Year meant nothing to Seishirou, he found it somewhat fitting that the Minister did not live to see midnight. In the morning, his body would be found half frozen in the snow with bundles of dirty money in his pockets. He would be exposed by the government as a dirty politician and offered to the people as a sacrifice. Within days his murder, no matter how messily rendered, would be forgotten and the government would be renewed in the eyes of the people as a just institution.

Renewal was the meaning of ritualistic holidays such as the New Year. It was a chance for people to wash away their previous shortcomings with silly resolutions that rarely came to pass. The death of a corrupt politician, the death of an old year—it was all interconnected in Seishirou's eyes. And while he remained irked at how the man's death came to pass, he was also amused at how no other night could have done justice to his passing.

A smirk twisted at the thin edges of his lips, and Seishirou flicked his crimson-stained wrist over the corpse, shaking free the thickening drops of blood from his skin. He bent to his knees to scoop a ball of snow into his bloodied palm. As it did around the stiffening body, the snow turned pink as it drank away the mess from his fingers. It was astounding how something so white could be so easily disfigured by the worst of sins.

Seishirou's smile spread over his face as the cold sphere in his hand darkened into a deeper shade of pink while his hand was subsequently cleansed. When the snowball deepened into a mortal red and was melting between his fingers, he straightened back over the body with a craving for a cigarette to warm his lungs on the long walk home.

As he reached into his coat pocket he froze, and his eye focused directly ahead at a silhouette on the other side of the alley. The figure was not much taller than a child, gaunt and covered in rags that flew about in the wind like wisps. The bedraggled creature was a street tramp that had the terrible misfortune of trespassing at the wrong moment.

Seishirou cursed as the shadow-child eyed the corpse at his feet with what must have been unrestrained terror. He had just committed mistake number three, the gravest of all errors he could have made: he let someone catch him in the act. There was nothing now to do but amend the mistake the only way he knew how.

Before Seishirou could take his second victim for the night, another wintry gust swept through the alley, causing both of them to shudder. Strands of dark, unkempt hair flew back from the intruder's frightened face, exposing the eyes for only a brief second. Something jumped inside of Seishirou as they glowed like an alley cat's in an unforgettable shade of green.

Entranced by the momentary glint of those two large orbs, he took a curious step over the Minister's body toward the other end of the alley. At once, the shadow darted around the corner in a dead sprint. A half-second later, Seishirou regained his senses and swore a second time before running after.

No matter what he would see in that strange shadow, no matter how familiar to him those eyes were in that fleeting moment, Seishirou would not be making anymore mistakes tonight.

Once he rounded the corner, he found a pathway of light footprints laid out before him in the snow. Icy wind cut against his face as he thundered through the back-roads after them. He liked to think of himself as agile despite his tall stature, yet each time he turned the next corner of the endless twists of alleys, the footprints remained with no other sign of the fleeing shadow.

The tail of his black trench coat whipped behind him in midair as he sprinted at full speed. Seishirou could not remember a chase so irritatingly challenging. He found himself running past faceless alleys littered with rusted dumpsters and fluorescent graffiti lining chipped brick walls. It was not long until he lost focus of the narrows winding around him and concentrated only on the skipping footprints that had no end.

As a final confounding element to his hopeless chase, Seishirou suddenly recognized his own larger footprints beside the ones he had been pursuing. He abruptly halted. He was running in circles after the shadow of an intruder that had all but vanished. He frowned; this night was testing his worthiness of being Sakurazukamori and he was not doing well at all.

He was further annoyed when he felt the cold touch of a snowflake resting on the tip of his nose. Seishirou looked down at himself to find his black coat dappled with specks of white. In minutes the fresh snow would fill the footprints and conceal them. His shoulders slumped, and he crossed his arms. Seishirou desperately wanted that cigarette now.

He reached into his pocket for the half empty pack of Mild Sevens when one of the steel garbage cans sneezed. The sound was pathetically weak, and if circumstances were not as desperate as they had become, Seishirou would not have heard it. He forgot about the cigarette and treaded over to a trio of garbage cans. The steel was frosted over in a lifeless shade of gray, but behind it he could hear the faintest sounds of uneven breathing.

In one swift movement, Seishirou lifted the foremost of the cans and tossed it off to the side. He found the elusive creature curled between the two remaining cans, partially submerged in the snow. The clothes that he wore—Seishirou concluded uncertainly that this pathetic thing was a boy—were hanging loosely from his emaciated figure and consisted only of frayed jeans, layers of rags, and a large, torn jacket. Beneath them, the boy was shivering violently, and the thin slivers of skin Seishirou caught exposed were pale enough to be mistaken for snow.

It was at that moment that Seishirou came to recognize a remnant of an old spell he had cast ten years ago. He gazed at the street tramp with his eyes fixed in shock as he realized that there was only one person alive that carried his mark. Reluctantly, the sorry creature raised his head from his chest, and Seishirou blanked.

He was looking directly at Sumeragi Subaru.

The boy's face was more drawn and exhausted than he would have thought possible, but nevertheless, it belonged to Subaru. Despite his sickly appearance, his eyes wildly gleamed back at Seishirou with terror.

Even Subaru's lips were growing pale when he parted them. A few breaths of air escaped his mouth in puffs of white before he managed to speak. "Are…are you going to murder me?" he whimpered in a voice that could have been shattered by the wind.

Seishirou did not expect those words from him. As he crouched down into the snow to examine Subaru, the same church bells from before sounded with greater clarity. The melody rang crisply in the remaining seconds before the New Year. Seishirou realized that the boy was genuinely afraid, and he knew at once that something was amiss. Fear was the unlikeliest emotion he ever expected to see in Subaru.

He stared into those scared green gems. "Is that what you want, Subaru-kun?"

The melody reached its conclusion and the bells clanged together, counting the hours in an outpouring of sound. _One…two…three…_

Tears crept to the edges of Subaru's enlarging eyelids. Seishirou watched closely—this was the reaction that he was expecting moments before, and he did not understand what he could have said to provoke those tears so suddenly.

_Four…five…_

"You…know who I am!" Subaru cried.

_Seven…eight…nine…ten…_

Before Seishirou could answer, before he could even make sense of what had already been said, Subaru collapsed into the snow. A tear shook loose of his dark eyelashes.

_Eleven…twelve._

The final bell echoed into the New Year. As its sound thinned, Seishirou kept his attention on the unconscious boy in front of him. Snow relentlessly clung to Subaru, slowly entombing him. This place would become his grave if he remained there dying of exposure.

None of that meant anything to Seishirou. His thoughts rested only on those cryptic last words. After a short time, however, Seishirou concluded that Subaru was not going to wake and say anything more.

Sighing admonishingly at him, Seishirou wrapped his arms over Subaru and lifted him from the snow. With no more thought toward the person in his arms, he began to navigate himself out of the alleys and back to the endless light of the city.

Not far away there was a horrified shriek over a fresh body surrounded by a patch of burgundy snow, but few could hear it over the bursts of fireworks ringing in the New Year.


	2. Tabula Rasa

Disclaimer: No, they're not mine. But if they were…

**To the People Who Reviewed: I LOVE you all!**

**Ruth**: It feels great to be writing again. I absolutely love the reviews you've always given me, they're very inspiring. Don't worry about Tsubasa; truth is I never really got into that series. I'm sticking to just one dimension.

**Isabeau**: Of course I'm going on! And thanks for such wonderful encouragement, that definitely helps!

**forgotten unmei**: Aww, thanks! That makes me excited to publish more.

**The Hall of Broken Mirrors**

**II. Tabula Rasa**

Shinkirou Towers was a vast complex of apartments jetting from the affluence of the Minatoku ward's Azabu district. It consisted of two towers whose windows mirrored back the prying light of the city in its nighttime brilliance. The sky-bound building was honeycombed into living quarters that varied in space, and it was said that even the smallest of rooms ran over a million yen a month.

Price was never an object for any of the residents at Shinkirou Towers. The apartments were like palaces in the sky, as one would expect with the most expensive housing in Tokyo, but what distinguished Shinkirou Towers was the privacy. The walls were insulated enough to smother a gunshot, as the managers claimed with pride. Whether this promise had ever been tested by the residents was not a remote possibility.

The tenants of Shinkirou Towers were likely (for no one knew for certain) some of the most prominent citizens of Tokyo, including celebrities, CEOs, ambassadors, but not excluding Yakuza lords and corrupt politicians. They would pass one another with their heads turned away, each weighed down by their own covert business. Living in Shinkirou Towers came with the promise of a thick veil of secrecy, and that alone was worth the millions.

Seishirou approached the lobby entrance with Subaru lying motionlessly in his arms. Subaru had proven himself to be a much lighter burden than he expected on the long walk home. It was not Seishirou's first time to carry him as he had done so on several occasions before, but Subaru was considerably easier to hold, indicating to him that the boy had lost a dangerous amount of weight. On the trek back to his apartment, Subaru had not so much as shivered, but grew steadily paler. Halfway to his destination, Seishirou was forced to remove his overcoat and insulate him while facing the piercing cold unprotected. It was still snowing outside, and he was deeply relieved when he arrived at the warm lobby.

One of the large, glass doors at the front of the building was held open for him by a uniformed doorman. "Happy New Year, Sir," the man said curtly as Seishirou passed. He regarded the unconscious boy in his arms with no more curiosity than he might if Seishirou were carrying in a stray cat.

Seishirou shuddered as blood rushed through his numb body, but he continued his brisk walk toward the elevator. By the time he arrived at the top floor, most of the stray snowflakes that were caught in his dark hair and suit had melted, soaking his already cold skin. As he miserably stepped out of the elevator, Seishirou was only too happy to arrive at his door.

After his last encounter with Subaru, he no longer had any incentive to remain a working veterinarian in a humble Shinjuku apartment. His true occupation had given him the means to live any way he desired, and he had no qualms about taking full advantage of his wealth. Seishirou lived in a spacious apartment with sleek wooden floors that ran around a kitchen and into a nearby dining corner, a living room equipped with fireplace, and a bathroom that might have been the size of his bedroom in Shinjuku. Under the arched ceilings that stretched over the halls were various cabinets whose contents Seishirou was prone to forget.

What he could not forget, however, was one of the two separate bedrooms, which was an office where he received faxes from employers he barely knew. It was the blood which these faxes demanded that financed his lifestyle. Had he been a different man, Seishirou might smell blood reeking from the floorboards. When he pushed open the door the only scent he detected was pine.

As he entered, Seishirou was so relieved that he almost forgot about the person in his arms. He paused where he stood in the middle of the living room and glanced at Subaru's face. From what he could tell, Subaru was still deeply unconscious, although color was seeping back into his complexion.

He unceremoniously placed Subaru on a shag rug in front of the unlit fireplace. Without wasting any more attention on the boy, Seishirou rubbed the circulation back into his arms and treaded down the hall to change out of his wet and bloodied clothes.

It was when feeling had flooded back to his body that Seishirou fully acknowledged that he had Sumeragi Subaru lying on his living room floor. The young onmyouji had been all but erased from his life in the last year. He had rarely even thought of Subaru since he had wounded him and plunged his hand into his twin sister's heart. Who had that helpless plaything become in that time? How much could a person really change in less than two years, even with the deep scars that an innocent like Subaru now carried?

The bizarre circumstances of their sudden encounter did not ease the weight of these questions. In an endless array of possible reunions he could have had with Subaru, he thought it impossible that he would find him in rags, freezing and starved in the snow. Despite his age, Subaru was the head of the prominent Sumeragi family—how was it possible for Seishirou to discover him in such a pathetic state?

What perplexed Seishirou the most was Subaru's erratic behavior.

_You…know who I am! _

Seishirou could not rid his mind of that frightened, shaking voice. What had Subaru meant by that, and why had he been so terrified to see him?

He emerged from his bedroom wearing an old pair of jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt and feeling human once again. From the middle of the hallway he could see Subaru violently shivering on the floor. This was a good sign as the boy's body had previously refused to fight against the cold. Any indication that he was regaining vitality was encouraging, especially after how grave his condition appeared only minutes before.

He knelt at Subaru's side and placed a hand on his forehead. No fever—maybe Subaru was not as ill as he assumed, but just a cursory glance over him made it clear to Seishirou that he was not in perfect health either.

It was now the year 1993, meaning that Subaru was eighteen, almost nineteen years old. Beneath the layers of grime and baggy clothes he could see that Subaru had grown over the last year and a half. His stature had increased by several centimeters and his narrow shoulders had just begun to broaden. In spite of these small changes Subaru remained undersized for a boy his age, even more so than before as he was clearly malnourished. Starvation and exposure were the most obvious reasons for him fainting and could perhaps explain his mysterious behavior.

Subaru may have been lucky that a high fever was not among his health problems, but Seishirou knew that his good fortune would not hold for long if he were to remain shivering in those drenched clothes. The best course of action was to strip Subaru completely and place him closer to the fireplace. With a smile, Seishirou speculated how the Subaru he knew would blush lividly at the very idea of something so simple. Yet whatever indignity the creature lying in front of him would suffer was of no concern to him. He began to tug off the heavy trench coat that he had placed over the boy, then the second coat which had been torn in several places.

He was about to remove a layer of the ragged shirts hanging from Subaru's torso when his eye roamed over his hands. Before they had been concealed by the coat, but now Seishirou was intrigued to discover a tangle of stained white rags that were wrapped from his wrists to the very tips of his fingers. He first thought of them as makeshift gloves, but as he unwrapped Subaru's left hand, he recognized what the brown stains splotching the white fabric were.

The rags wrapped around Subaru's hands were bandages that were covered in blood. When Seishirou finished uncovering the slender hand, he froze. A gruesome, purple scar lined the spiritual mark he had made on Subaru years before. The inverted pentagram appeared as though it had been bleeding, and Seishirou knew at once that this was not his work. The sign of the Sakurazukamori was a spiritual scar that had no reason to culminate into a physical injury. Subaru's hands had been slashed open.

He was about to remove the bandage on the right hand when his gaze strayed down to Subaru's wrist. A ring of plastic hung from his forearm, and when Seishirou examined it, he saw that the plastic notch that held the bracelet together was almost worn through. He effortlessly plucked it from Subaru's arm. The plastic band was as filthy as any other article of clothing on Subaru, but through the grime he could almost make out something that had been typewritten on a band of paper protected by the outer seal of plastic. He brought the bracelet to the bridge of his nose, trying to make out just one character, but before he came close to succeeding, a plaintive moan shifted his attention back to the wet figure before him.

Subaru's arm clumsily shifted along the wooden floor along with his legs in an unconscious effort to regain feeling in those limbs. His drawn face had regained much of its color and pink lips twisted into a frown. Seishirou leaned over to watch, ignoring all signs that Subaru was waking, until large green eyes snapped open.

Subaru gasped and drew back so quickly that a nearby coffee table made an unpleasant thump against his back. His eyes had been the same as they had been before in that alley, radiant with fear as they roved around his new surroundings.

"Wh-where am I!? What happened?" he cried.

"In my apartment," Seishirou answered evenly. He lifted himself off the floor and sat on a black leather sofa. "I found you passed out in the snow. It's dangerous to fall asleep out in those conditions."

Subaru carefully regarded Seishirou. At first, the terror held fast on his expression. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. For a split second, Seishirou believed that he was recognized, and he expected Subaru to respond with the anger and agony he had left him a year and half ago. But that moment came and went, and Subaru only gazed up at him with timid curiosity. As a long pause hung between them, Seishirou came to the conclusion that the only thing that held Subaru's attention was his glass eye.

Subaru dipped his head to the floor. "Thank you…thank you so much for helping me. I must have fainted…the cold…" he muttered in a small, but slightly deeper voice than Seishirou remembered. He averted his eyes with shame. "I'm sorry for causing you any trouble, Sir."

It finally sank in for Seishirou that he had no place in Subaru's memory. His mind came to a bemused halt, and he had nothing to say when Subaru cautiously looked up at him.

Subaru took his silence for a dismissal, and he struggled to his wobbly legs. "S-sorry. I'm sorry that you had to find me. I'll leave so I won't bother you anymo—"

"You can't leave," interjected Seishirou, who found himself standing. Subaru flinched, and he realized that he must have spoken more desperately than he meant. Not knowing what came over him, he continued with the edge of his voice smoothed over. "It would be reckless in your condition. You look completely famished, and you barely have the strength to stand. What kind of host would I be if I let you stumble out of here without having something to eat?" After going through all the discomfort and exhaustion of carrying him here, he was not about to let Subaru escape, especially not until he understood what was happening.

"You don't need to go to any more trouble…" Subaru protested shakily.

"If I let you leave and you collapse in the snow again, the trouble I've already went to would be meaningless," he replied. Subaru looked away guiltily, and the argument was over. "I'll start something on the oven and we can have a late dinner or an early breakfast…whatever you would like to call it."

Subaru said nothing as Seishirou disappeared into the kitchen with a smile at the boy. But the truth was that Seishirou did not want to smile then. He thought that when Subaru woke his questions would be answered, but he was only more baffled. And to worsen the situation, Subaru seemed to be just as confused. He could remember nothing between them, but amnesia was hardly a satisfying conclusion.

When he crossed the tiles lining the kitchen floor and reached into the nearest cabinet for a skillet, Seishirou realized for the first time that he, too, was starving. He gazed at the green digits glowing on the microwave clock—1:33 am—and wondered if it was correct. He had nowhere to go in the morning and did not anticipate any new jobs for the next week, considering the high profile of his last victim. Nonetheless, he was surprised that it had become this late without him noticing.

Seishirou was not always in the habit of cooking for himself; he enjoyed frequenting the restaurants of Sunshine 60 and the clubs in Aoyama, but he was not so out of practice that he forgot how to prepare a decent meal. With the beginning of a chicken stir-fry simmering on the oven, he remembered that Subaru was still in freezing, wet clothes. He doubted that he would coax Subaru out of them anytime soon, and settled for the next best alternative by placing a tea kettle on the adjacent burner.

Steam carrying an enticing scent was flooding from the oven top when a frail voice rose from the kitchen entrance. "Thank you," said Subaru while bowing from his waist.

"You wouldn't expect me to let you leave without a meal when it's so obvious that you're famished?"

Subaru failed at hiding the confusion in his face. "Not many people would bother to care."

Seishirou shrugged. "I'm not like many people." He turned down the dial of the stove, allowing the stir-fry to cool, and turned to him. "For better or for worse."

"What I meant was…you already went to so much trouble for someone like me, and you're a complete stranger." Subaru stared at the kitchen tiles.

"Seishirou," he said firmly, hoping that he might trigger a hidden memory in Subaru.

He glanced up. "What?"

"Sakurazuka Seishirou—my name," he remarked with a fleeting feeling of surprise that he had to give it at all.

"Sakurazuka…Seishirou…" Subaru repeated, as if reading poetry. His eyes were blank without the faintest glimmer of recognition.

"And your name?" prompted Seishirou, wondering how much of his life Subaru did remember.

"Oh!" he cried apologetically. "I-I'm sorry…my name…it's Subaru."

"And do you have a family name, Subaru-kun?"

Subaru gazed back down at the same tile he had found so interesting before. "I don't have one. I don't have a family."

Seishirou blinked. "I see." Subaru had no idea who he was. Did he know anything of what he could do, his talent as an onmyouji?

At this point there was little that the boy could say that would surprise him, but it was clear by the pain in Subaru's eyes that he did not want to speak of it anymore.

Reluctantly, Seishirou left the question for later. "Can you tell me what you were doing out there in the snow, Subaru-kun?"

Subaru shifted his weight from one leg to another. His brow crinkled as he tried to recall. "I thought…that something was chasing me. Something bad…but that's impossible, isn't it?"

A high-pitched scream erupted from the stove, and their short conversation was ended. Seishirou turned to the teapot that wheezed out a cloud of white steam, lifted the tortured instrument from the stove, and proceeded to pour the hot liquid into a mug with a teabag.

"Sit down, and drink this. It should bring back some feeling to your body," Seishirou ordered him as he placed the mug on the table.

Subaru obeyed without a word, and as his lips touched the cup, Seishirou set two plates of food down and took his seat across from him.

"Go on," he urged Subaru when he hesitated to pick up the chopsticks placed in front of him. "It won't poison you."

Subaru must have been on the brink of fainting a second time he looked so hungry, but he handled his chopsticks with slow, graceful precision as though he were frightened that the slightest error would be offensive. It took Seishirou a moment to notice that Subaru was watching his hands and imitating his movements. He did not even know how to use the chopsticks.

At best, Subaru was nibbling at the meal with that pace, but Seishirou said nothing since he was obviously too ashamed to admit his predicament. What interested him more was how Subaru appeared to notice between mouthfuls that his scarred left hand was exposed.

"I can give you something to clean that and wrap it in some fresh bandages."

"Th-thank you, but you don't have to! I'm sorry you had to see it," he stammered almost unintelligibly as he hid both his hands beneath the table.

He sighed at Subaru's irritatingly docile behavior. "You shouldn't apologize. After all, I am the one that unwrapped that hand," he explained without remorse. "Before you awoke I was trying to undress you. To be perfectly honest, I would still like to see you out of those clothes."

If there had been any doubt that this enigmatic creature was Sumeragi Subaru, it dissolved when Seishirou noticed a bright red blush rising to his cheeks. "_What_?" Subaru was on the verge of jumping out of his chair and escaping.

Seishirou smiled; beneath his empty and sad demeanor Subaru was still capable of being flustered. He navigated his chopsticks to the remaining bit of chicken on his plate. "You're soaking. If you don't take a warm bath soon, you'll catch a cold—or worse."

Subaru's muscles unclenched, and he looked at the Sakurazukamori with guilt for mistaking his intentions. "Um…I don't want you to…I mean…" he trailed away, realizing now that it would be useless to refuse. Seishirou had already lifted himself out of his seat, intent on guiding him to the bathroom the moment he had finished eating.

As Subaru nervously tread past the doorway, he jumped at the sudden thundering of hot water. The bathtub was Japanese, square and deep, and Subaru watched it fill with fascination as if he had never seen running water before. When Seishirou added soap to the torrents of gathering water to create foaming bubbles, Subaru's eyes widened; the entire display was foreign to him.

While he stared, lost in thought, at the water Seishirou snuck behind him and yanked the damp shirt over his head. Much to his delight, Subaru gasped and staggered back. He was still wearing an undershirt that clung to his skin, but he wrapped his arms around his chest like he was stark naked.

Seishirou chuckled. "Are you going to get in or do you need help with the pants, too, Subaru-kun?"

His eyes enlarged at Seishirou, and he took another step away, his reaction more of surprise than humiliation. Avoiding Seishirou's fascinated eye, he asked quietly, "Could you please look away?"

He laughed, and walked past Subaru toward the hall. "I'll leave some clean clothes by the door for you after you finish. Enjoy yourself." He pulled the door shut before Subaru could stammer anything more. He smiled to himself and began searching for his pack of cigarettes in the next room. He had almost forgotten what a joy it was to embarrass Subaru.

* * *

Snow showered from the black abyss over rows of sleepless skyscrapers. Sometimes it was so thick that he had to strain to see the elusive specks of night among the lit flurry of snowflakes. A storm this powerful was rare in Tokyo—he had not remembered when it last snowed so violently. But only seconds after observing the city drowning in the snowfall, he became bored, and his thoughts strayed elsewhere.

Seishirou exhaled a breath of smoke at the cold glass window and watched it rebound in fading coils through the air. For a few tempting moments he considered peaking into the bathroom as Subaru innocently washed. But the thought faded after several more puffs of cigarette smoke, and in his boredom, he merely stared at the glass door of the balcony.

He replayed the last two hours in his head, each time ending with a vague sense of disappointment. He was not disappointed to have found Subaru in the first place—that had been an unexpected and pleasant surprise. The new year, as it had progressed so far, had proven to be more fascinating with every second. He had hoped to see some change in the boy, to see a new, bitter and broken Subaru in place of the innocent he had played with for a year.

But this unmet expectation was trivial. His greatest misgiving about the situation was that he still knew so little about the circumstances behind it. As with most questions in his life he expected a clear resolution, but it felt like Seishirou knew less and less about Subaru the more he thought about him.

Subaru had lost his memory. Amnesia, insanity, a head injury—anything could have made him this way. He did not know his full name, much less his family. But above all, Subaru could not remember _him_. His eyes passed through him blank of emotion, empty of all the turmoil and heartache that he had instilled in him at their last encounter. Sakurazuka Seishirou was just another name, and although he did not understand why, this bothered him most of all. He did not want to be forgotten.

The only benefit of the situation that Seishirou could see was that being forgotten saved a large amount of effort in keeping Subaru close. He was not his sister's killer, the man that broke his body and spirit, the infamous Sakurazukamori; he was a simple bystander that bothered to save the boy's life. With the smallest amount of manipulation, Subaru would remain at his side while he learned what had changed him. Subaru, regardless of the time that had passed remained his prey, and he had every right to know the truth.

"Is that the snow? It…looks like the stars are falling," remarked Subaru breathlessly.

Seishirou looked over his shoulder to find Subaru standing several feet away with a dreamy expression on his face. He was about to answer when he took in the boy's unobscured features for the first time.

He looked somewhat ridiculous draped in Seishirou's t-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants that slid down to his hips. Yet the layers of grime that had coated his face had been dissolved away, revealing an almost completely different person than Seishirou remembered. His features had sharpened, leaving his face a delicate porcelain craft framed by strands of wet black hair that spilled past his ears. His skin was naturally powdered white, which by contrast, drew more attention to his deep green eyes. As Seishirou stared at him, he realized that Subaru had matured from the cute little plaything he once was. He was beautiful.

Believing that he had said something wrong to cause the other man's lapse into silence, Subaru immediately looked away. Seishirou shook himself out of his daze and put out his cigarette against the glass door. "If it continues to snow like this, we'll have a blizzard. It won't be until tomorrow afternoon that the roads and sidewalks are cleared, at the earliest."

"Oh, I see…" replied Subaru, his excitement at the storm dissipating. "If you want, I can sleep on the floor."

"If _you_ want, you can sleep with me," Seishirou offered back with a wolfish smirk.

"I-I don't want to bother you, Sakurazuka-san…" he stammered. Although not blushing, he was visibly flustered at the offer.

Seishirou closed the distance between them. "Call me Seishirou."

He swallowed hard. "Seishirou-sama."

Seishirou winced at that, but let it rest with a sigh. There would be time for them to work on honorifics later. "You can sleep on the sofa. I'll find some spare blankets and a pillow for you."

Subaru's shoulders slumped with relief.

"Of course…" he continued before the boy could speak, "…you don't have to stay just the night."

"Excuse me?"

"I would be happy to let you stay longer—long enough so that you can avoid returning to the streets."

Subaru looked from Seishirou to the floor, back and forth. "Seishirou-sama…thank you, I really appreciate it, but you really shouldn't involve yourself with someone like me."

"Interesting," remarked Seishirou. "That's the second time you've said that. 'Someone like you.' Is there something wrong with you, Subaru-kun? Are you in any trouble?"

"No, it's not that…"

"Drugs? Are you a thief?"

His eyes shot open. "No!" he cried. "Nothing like that!"

He paced around Subaru, unable to resist the urge to tease him one more time. "And you don't behave like you sell your body. No, someone as pretty as you would not be living in an alley if that were the case."

Subaru's face was on fire. "I-I, n-no! I don't…!"

Seishirou snickered. "Well, there seems to be no reason you can't stay."

"I lost my memory!" he blurted out. Seishirou said nothing while Subaru pressed a hand to his mouth. He cringed at his revelation. "I…don't remember who I am. That's why I couldn't give you my family name. Even the name 'Subaru'…it was on a bracelet I once wore. I don't even know if I have a real name…"

Seishirou clutched the stolen piece of plastic in his pocket. "What if I helped you?" he offered.

"You don't understand! I could be anyone! I could have done anything! I can't let you get involved."

He grinned at that—if only Subaru had known how involved he already was. "I can take care of myself. You, however, cannot."

"Seishirou-sama—"

"You cannot think that you're worthless because you have no identity. And you ought to let me choose what kind of person I bother with."

Unable to resist temptation, Subaru reluctantly raised his eyes at Seishirou. "You…can help me find out who I am?"

"If you let me help you, Subaru-kun, you will find that I have better resources than anyone to see that you are well taken care of."

He shifted to escape Seishirou's confident gaze to no avail. Whatever desire was in Subaru to accept his offer was locked with ambivalence. Seishirou could see him desperately searching for a reply, and he wondered if Subaru was suspecting his true intentions.

"Th-thank you, Seishirou-sama. But I'm not sure if I can ask you to do anything more."

"Why don't you sleep on it, then?" he suggested, while already knowing that he had won. He still knew how to control Subaru with empty acts of kindness. "But perhaps some dessert first? I can see that you're still hungry."

Subaru weakly smiled at him, but the expression only decorated his pale lips while his eyes remained frozen in the same mosaic of sorrow and feral anxiety. He followed Seishirou like a pet being led forward on a leash, unknowingly his to torture and deceive as long as he remained entertaining.

But as Seishirou gave his own emotionless smile, he knew that something had changed. Behind that decorative veil of emotion, it was Subaru who was truly empty. All there remained in that sorrowful gaze was the loneliness of being cast out of his own memory. There were only shards left of Sumeragi Subaru, so minute and fragile that he wondered if enough remained for him to understand exactly what did the breaking.

He would find the truth. Seishirou would know everything that there was to learn about the former Sumeragi. Then he would bleed him slowly, telling Subaru exactly who he was and what they were together as he faded away. And he would drink in the expression of those dying eyes as if it were the sweetest honey.


	3. Awake

Wah! I finally updated! College has started again, and these first few weeks have been insane. I can't always guarantee a timely update, but I'll try and post a little more often from now on. And I promise—truly promise on a stack of TB manga—that I will not let this story go unfinished. Thank you for all the wonderful reviews; it may not seem like it, but your reviews kick my sorry ass into shape when it's time for me to write.

**azulfyre:**_ Thank you! And I really, really want to update more often, because I love writing it. Yet life likes to get in the way of that…_

**MeyRevived2: **_Eeeeh! You reviewed! I heart you, Meirav! Your review made me feel very special. And of course Sei-chan makes mistakes. He's a blind assassin—by nature he's imperfect._

**Keeper Of Destiny: **_Rapturous rapture, I hope? Hee, it's great to hear that the plot is interesting. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in a story that I don't know if others find it fascinating at all._

**Fra: **_Seishirou is a jerk-idiot. And a Meanie-head. And as for a sort-of happy ending…mwahaha (devilish grin), this is a mystery story, and that's part of the mystery._

**forgotten unmei: **_What kind of SxS fanfic would this be without fangirl humor? Glad you caught the idea of the Tabula Rasa. I love it when people get the out-there philosophy references._

* * *

**The Hall of Broken Mirrors**

**III. Awake**

A thin sliver of light fell from a crack in the door, leaving the entire room a cell of lifeless gray. Even in near darkness, the glare of the white walls was inescapable. In this prison, they were one of many instruments by which madness descended. By day, by night and in between, the walls persistently leered over every room and corridor until even the strongest of wills dimmed and became inscrutable from the blank surroundings.

It had already begun. Alongside a stiff bed, a figure had been sitting for hours without movement. He was nearly undetectable against the dead white walls; skin, clothes, even eyes had assumed the same hopeless shade of gray by nightfall. Only a mass of thick ebony hair defiantly distinguished him as a person, a boy that was waiting for nothing to come.

Not once since his return to this room had he stirred from the plastic seat of his wheelchair. He had become numb to its discomfort. He could not feel the scratchy, paper-thin robe draped over his ashen body or the bandages squeezing his hands from the forearm down.

Occasionally, shadows would pass the cracked door with raucous laughs, but these voices provoked nothing from him anymore. He was stone, staring forward, unblinking, unfeeling and unthinking at the wall in front of him.

In the distance beyond the gray room, there echoed a persistent tapping. It was the sound of heels clicking over the tile floors—a hurried and uneven rhythm like a clock being forced against its will. The clicks came down faster and louder until a shadow emerged at the front of the room and burst through the door.

Light flooded onto his white face, but it did nothing to break the paralysis that had taken hold of him. In the new light, the person who had entered remained in shadow. The tapping of heels ceased, and the intruder did not dare take another step forward.

"_Subaru-san!"  
_

Silence.

A hand rose to cover the shadow's quivering mouth. A long time passed before that same hand pushed the door shut. Under the glare of the walls, the newcomer's silhouette took the form of a woman, also dressed in white, who was near tears at the sight of him.

"_S-Subaru-san…" _She whimpered and took a tentative step toward the motionless boy. _"…what have they done to you?"_

He answered with a vacant stare.

She collapsed forward, and with a sob, she buried her face against his lap. _"I'm sorry! Subaru-san, I should've been there! I should've stopped them! I failed you, I let you down! If only…if only I knew what they would do."_

Her hot tears soaked through his robe and into his skin. She clutched his knee ever tighter as hysterical apologies drowned into muffled cries. She trembled against him, and for a split second, the woman crying in his lap was entirely different. In place of her long ponytail, he saw hair that was cropped to her chin. In place of black eyes he saw green that glowed like his did once. In the space of that short instant, a piece of the boy that had been locked deep inside only wished to hug her close and assure her that there was nothing she could have done.

But the moment passed into nothing, and the woman's original appearance returned. It had all been a trick of the grayness and little more. He could only look into the wall as this stricken woman wept for him. In his stupor, he had been made a prisoner in his own unmoving body.

When she no longer choked on her breath, and the stream of tears slowed down her face, she rose from his wheelchair and stared directly into his blank eyes. _"They're killing you, Subaru-san. I promise you, I won't let them touch you ever again." _

She resolutely straightened herself. _"You don't belong here. So I'm going to take you away from this place. But, Subaru-san,"_ she whispered as her thin fingers brushed the side of his face_, "you have to promise me something. You can't remain like this. You have to wake up or else they've already killed you. Promise me that you'll wake up."_

His eyes remained locked forward, blind to her pleading expression. After a lingering silence, she looked away with her eyes filled with hurt. Her hand left his face, and she moved away. This struck fear into that distant, caged part of him that she would leave for good.

"_I'm sorry, Subaru-san,"_ she whispered. Hesitantly, she raised her hand and brought it hard against his face. A sharp noise echoed through the cell followed by the swinging of his head from the neck as though he were a ragdoll. The entire right half of his head pulsed with a sharp pain that steadily broke through his menagerie and dissolved away the paralyzing emptiness until he could feel again.

The sensation of physical pain was at once overwhelming, but it slowly dissipated with a growing awareness that he had been freed from a treacherous hold placed on his mind. His eyes stung from the throbbing in his head and the agony of still deeper wounds. He blinked for the first time in what seemed like days, and a tear that culminated all this new grief rushed down his face.

This greatly relieved the woman, who had been shivering in the aftermath of the beating. He laid eyes on her with recognition, and she offered the hand she had used to strike him. _"Let me help you leave this place," _she whispered anxiously, her hand steady in the air. _"Subaru-san, it's time to wake up."_

Still overtaken by all the sensations descending over him, he was surprised to find his own hand stirring of its own volition away from the wheelchair armrest. His white fingers ascended into the air in front of him like wisps of a ghost. As they neared the woman's palm, he knew nothing but relief. The walls around him crumbled, and she pulled back her arm to lift him heavenwards.

_**Wake up!**_

* * *

With a sudden gasp for air, Subaru launched himself forward from where he slept. His heartbeat sprinted as if chased by the disturbing sensation of something climbing up his spine. The surrounding darkness felt like it was spinning in a heavy blur as a consequence of his jolt into consciousness. A sudden barrage of images from his sleep then swept down at him, but Subaru was alarmed to realize that he could not reconstruct a single moment from the dream.

He could almost see the hazy face of a woman, pink lips and sad eyes, but these images were soon forgotten as violently as they had come to him. Nonetheless, something beneath his racing heart told him that he had just had an important dream and that he must use all his willpower to remember it. Yet moments later, he had forgotten why the dream should be important at all, and he slowly regained his composure.

The air around him was no longer spinning. When Subaru took in his surroundings, he gave a brief start before remembering that he was in the home of a man, who, for some reason must have pitied him. He sunk back into the leather couch that he had been sleeping on and curled himself up in a thick duvet. With a deep breath, he assured himself that he only had a bad dream, and it would be rude of him to stay awake dwelling on it while Seishirou had kindly given him a place to sleep away from the cold.

Subaru closed his eyes tight and hoped to fall back asleep. However, he could not dispel the last fading fragments of the dream. As he lied awake against his will, Subaru could almost see black eyes and frightening blank walls. He could almost feel a warm hand at his fingers that, until he finally succumbed to sleep, would not abandon him.

* * *

On January 4th, three days after what the papers claimed to be the worst blizzard to befall Tokyo in the last fifty years, the snow obscuring the sidewalks and the ice slicking the streets had been sufficiently cleared for the city to resume its fast rhythm. In Shibuya, people window shopped at the upscale apparel stores under an umbrella of indifference to the snow-rimmed streets and the fierce cold. It was in one of these busy clothing stores that Sakurazuka Seishirou maneuvered through the crowds of shoppers.

While he normally detested large gatherings of people, he wore a genuine grin on his face as he brushed past the racks of clothing and neared the dressing rooms at the back of the store. Had he known that clothes shopping for Subaru was this much fun, he never would have refused all those times to accompany him when Hokuto insisted on changing his wardrobe. He always thought that such activities were boring, but Seishirou was taking immense pleasure in dressing Subaru and having him model his outfits.

They had flitted in and out of department stores in Shibuya the entire morning. Seishirou was intent on providing Subaru with every article of clothing he could think of—shoes, socks, pajamas, jackets, jeans, shirts and underwear, which been a joyously traumatic experience for Subaru.

The only thing that he withheld from him was a pair of gloves. The sight of his bare hands affirmed for Seishirou that it would never be hidden again that Subaru was his marked prey, which outweighed the poor boy's self-consciousness at his gruesome scars.

He never told Seishirou how he received the wounds on his hands, nor much of anything despite spending three days with him behind closed doors. It had been a challenge for Seishirou to have him agree to stay, but getting Subaru to disclose anything of his bizarre history on the streets was far more difficult. He had attempted to press the topic several times, but such a look of sadness and shame came over Subaru that his gentle veterinarian's persona was forced to leave it for later.

By the third day, he decided that a trip to Shibuya might cheer Subaru into sharing something, but so far he was the only one finding joy in the plan. Undaunted, Seishirou readjusted the pile of clothes under his arm and located the dressing room at the end of the hall. A shadow quivered under the one centimeter crack beneath the door the moment he knocked.

"Subaru-kun? I found several more outfits for you to try on—and I found that sweater in your size."

"More clothes?" replied a wearied voice on the other side.

He deliberately ignored the signs that Subaru was exhausted. "Are you decent? I'd like to see how that last outfit looks on you."

After a moment of panicked rustling in the small room, Subaru fumbled the door open, and hung on the doorknob breathlessly as Seishirou took in his appearance.

His choice of clothing for Subaru had nothing in common with what he had been forced to wear during the year of their bet when his older twin was alive. Before he had been adorned as a colorful peacock in outlandish outfits, but Seishirou now saw to it that Subaru's wardrobe more mature. He would wear dark, solid colors, although Seishirou allowed an occasional green piece to violate this rule. And as a wicked necessity, he ensured that almost all of the clothing was skin tight so that the boy would sometimes blush under his gaze.

The effect of this change of clothing accentuated every physical change in Subaru since that year. It made him appear paler and brought out his slender figure. The blacks and dark reds of his wardrobe brightened his eyes, but left the blankness that they now held untouched. Ultimately, Seishirou had refined him into a stunningly beautiful doll.

The outfit that Subaru was now wearing was no exception to this effect. He was dressed in a crimson sweater that ran along his torso like a second skin, the sleeves flaring out three-quarters down his arms. A pair of black slacks hung loose from his malnourished waist and extended into boots of the same color with silver buckles wrapped around. So far it was Seishirou's favorite outfit on him.

"Wonderful," he commented after moments of simply staring at Subaru's chest. "But put this on," he ordered while handing him a black jacket he picked out of the pile of clothing.

Without a word, Subaru obediently pulled his arms through the sleeves and gingerly adjusted the jacket to his lithe body. It was modern in style, with many useless pockets and buckles. But in spite of its tackiness, it echoed every curve of his waist and perfectly matched Subaru's shoes.

He stepped back from the dressing room to appraise the work of art he had accomplished. "What do you think, Subaru-kun?"

Subaru avoided his reflection in the mirror. "Seishirou-sama—um, I mean, Seishirou-san," he stammered, the more familiar honorific still foreign to his lips. He played with the price tag, which dangled from the right sleeve of the jacket. "I appreciate this, I really do, but the price…"

Seishirou mentally sighed while preparing himself for another debate on price. "As I've said before, money isn't an object here."

"B-But Seishirou-sama—Seishirou-san!" Subaru raised his eyes, and a feeble smile touched his lips. "When I accepted your hospitality, I promised that I would eventually pay you back. And…I just don't think I can ever afford this…"

Seishirou had indulged this agreement only to coax Subaru into staying at his side. He had never expected this promise to become such a liability. "Then you can think of this as a gift. You don't need to pay someone back for a gift, Subaru-kun."

"But I've already accepted a lot of your gifts." He paused and swallowed hard, afraid that he might have offended him. "It's not that I'm ungrateful…you've been so kind to me when you had no reason to. I just don't want you to bother—"

"Subaru-kun, I'm doing this because I want to help you. You deserve something else to wear besides oversized jeans and a torn jacket, and I want to give you that."

Subaru remained unconvinced and confused as the price tag was juggled along his fingertips.

Seishirou audibly sighed this time, realizing that his morning of entertainment would have to end if he was going to win the argument. "We'll make a compromise, then. You'll let me give you the jacket and—" he raised his voice a little when Subaru protested, "—and this will be the last outfit we'll buy."

Subaru brightened at the proposition. "No more clothes."

"Does that sound fair?"

"A-Alright. Yes."

"Good." With a predatory smirk, Seishirou closed in on him. Subaru staggered back, and Seishirou took advantage of his momentary state of unbalance to spin him around. Trapped between Seishirou and the mirror, Subaru cringed as he was forced to look at his reflection.

Seishirou dismissed his behavior as nothing more than his usual reluctance. "Now take a good look because if this is the last outfit, it should be perfect. Is there anything else that you want?"

Subaru uneasily stared at the person on the other side of the mirror. He chewed on his bottom lip and tugged at his sleeves, a sign that Seishirou had already decoded to mean that there was something, but Subaru could not bring himself to ask for it.

"Go on, tell me, Subaru-kun."

He hesitated. "Is there a smaller pants size?"

Seishirou had been waiting for him to notice this flaw. "If we did get a smaller size, it would only be good for a short time. I'm having you gain weight."

"What?"

"At least five, maybe ten kilos. You're far too thin, Subaru-kun. I can see your ribs poking out under your shirt."

Embarrassed at this vulnerability Subaru quickly folded the jacket completely over his chest, wondering what else Seishirou could see through his shirt.

Seishirou chuckled at his shyness; despite having lost his memory, this quality seemed inherent in Subaru. "In the meantime, I hope this will do," he said, offering him a black leather belt.

Unable to argue about price any longer, he accepted it with a muffled word of gratitude. But when he shifted to close the dressing room door, Seishirou stopped him. "You can wear this out of the store. The clerks won't mind."

"But…why?"

"I thought you might prefer to wear this to lunch."

The exhaustion returned to Subaru's voice. "We're going out to lunch?"

"You're going to get started on gaining weight. I happen to know an excellent Korean barbeque restaurant several blocks away. And there's an ice cream shop next to it."

This pushed a smile out of him. "Ice cream? There's still snow outside."

"If you want my opinion, that's the best time to have it."

They exited the store towing half a dozen bags each. A salesclerk who had originally scowled at Subaru's ragged appearance when he had entered now held the door open for him without any knowledge that this was the same young man.

Outside, gray clouds continued to conceal every ray of sunlight. It was dark, wet and cold beyond the warmth of the store, yet the streets were still overpopulated with a wave of people scurrying forward in the opposite direction. Without any explanation, Seishirou removed the bags from Subaru's right hand.

"Seishirou-sama—san? I can carry those. You don't have to—"

"When the light at that intersection changes, hold onto me so you don't get lost."

Subaru turned pink, but said nothing, assenting that it was necessary. In the brief walks between stores, he had been swept away in the wrong direction four times, tripped and fell three times, and been shepherded into corners on more occasions than Seishirou could count. After being plucked from the hidden alleys of Tokyo, Subaru was struggling against the city's ordinary flood of people.

With his eyes lowered, Subaru wrapped his fingers into the sleeve of Seishirou's jacket and allowed himself to be guided down the sidewalk like a toddler. Whether he was embarrassed or indignant about this treatment Seishirou could not tell and did not care. His attention had suddenly been captured by a window of flashing televisions, all tuned into a familiar alley.

Bright yellow tape had been fastened onto poles bordering a patch of crimson snow, and the screen flashed to uniformed cops trying to appear busy. The voice of a solemn newswoman played along with the dancing images, but there was little that he could hear over the honks of cars and the rushing banter of crowds. There were the words "minister", "murdered", "treason" and—his personal favorite—"corrupt politician." People passed by the window without casting the images a second glance. The assassination had already been accepted as nothing more than an unfortunate event to befall a scandalous man.

Seishirou glanced at Subaru to see if the broadcast had recalled his memory of that night, which so far had been dismissed as a mere delusion. But Subaru was not even listening. Instead, he clung tighter to Seishirou's sleeve, regardless of the fact that the crowds had considerably thinned. Subaru fidgeted, and he was about to ask him if there was anything wrong when he heard the giggles of a passing schoolgirls. He then noticed, with annoyance, that he was not the only one who enjoyed looking at Subaru.

Women smiled slyly at him, young girls whispered to each other, and even the occasional man winked at him. A blush suffused over Subaru's face, and he looked like he wanted to hide underneath the sidewalk. Given that his only memory was that of living unseen on the streets, Subaru must have been overwhelmed by the situation. For Seishirou, this was unacceptable, and he abandoned his interest in the news program to guide his prey away from dissecting stares.

They both relaxed when Seishirou opened the restaurant door, and they were enveloped in the warm scents of barbequed meat. Subaru at once unlatched himself from Seishirou's coat sleeve and followed him at a widened distance to a table.

"Are you well, Subaru-kun?" queried Seishirou after a waiter had left them. "You're reading your menu upside down."

Subaru righted the menu, but paid no attention to its contents. As though someone else was listening intently, he leaned forward and whispered, "Why was everyone looking at us?"

"Perhaps it's because you're so pretty," he offered with a grin.

At first, Subaru had mistaken his words for another strange joke, and attempted a fractured laugh. When he realized that Seishirou was entirely serious, he blanched. "But Seishirou-sama…I'm a guy."

He shrugged. "Why should that matter? Beautiful is beautiful, regardless of gender. If you don't believe me, look in the mirror until you see it."

Subaru went silent and practiced with the pair of wooden chopsticks set before him. Although Subaru had never admitted it, Seishirou was convinced that he had lost the memory of how to properly use them. As he watched him attempt to lift a napkin from the table, he reflected on the other small things that Subaru had forgotten. How to tie shoes, how to make tea, how to comb his hair: these simple acts were obliterated while other knowledge remained. He could not think of an ailment that could be so selective in its havoc. Seishirou could not think of anything that would explain what he observed.

Subaru failed to hold the napkin between the chopsticks for more than a second. He set the chopsticks aside and glanced up with hesitation. "Do you know…that when I look at myself in the mirror, I'm nervous?"

"Why is that?" he asked quickly. He excited to hear even the smallest piece of information from the boy.

"I-I don't know. Maybe I'm scared that if I see my reflection, it won't be like I remembered."

"Everyone's reflection changes, Subaru-kun."

Subaru fixed his eyes on the edge of the table. "Yes…I know that it's a silly thing to fear…but I just didn't want it to happen again."

Seishirou set down his menu. "You didn't want what to happen again?" he pressed.

Subaru's mouth quivered, but before any words could emerge, the waiter had returned for their orders. Grateful for the interruption, Subaru made no objection when Seishirou ordered for the both of them. Seishirou, on the other hand, had to stop himself from glaring at the waiter. When the menus were taken away, it was apparent that Subaru would say nothing more.

He frowned at the unsatisfying silence. "Well…whatever it was, Subaru-kun. I will make sure that it won't happen again. In time, when you look at yourself the mirror, you'll do so knowing exactly who you are," he promised, and meant it despite of his plans for him.

"How?" Subaru asked as Seishirou wickedly mused to himself. "On that night, you told me you had resources."

"That's right."

Subaru paused, and failed at another attempt to pick up the napkin with his chopsticks. "Are you like a detective, Seishirou-sama, I-I mean Seishirou-_san_?"

"I suppose that, in a sense, you can say that I am," Seishirou replied cryptically, wanting to further pique Subaru's interest.

"What is it that you do?"

He wondered for three days when this question would come and saw no reason to give a ridiculous lie. "I do favors for the government, every once in a while," he explained, careful not to scare him with the full truth. "Sometimes my job requires me to research a person, and I gain access to information that few will ever know." Seishirou neglected to mention that this information was usually faxed to him along with the name of his target. "I'm afraid that is all that I can tell you."

"I'm sorry, that was forward…" mumbled Subaru.

"Not at all—you have a right to know how I'm going to help you," he answered disingenuously. But mingled with the lies he had just told, Seishirou was pleased that he had not completely assumed the identity of a veterinarian. He had wasted a year pretending to be someone that he detested for his prey. He had prided himself on his acting skills during the bet, but now that he had Subaru under an entirely new set of circumstances, he did not know whether he should act at all. Beyond the empty acts of compassion he had used to gain Subaru's trust, who was Sakurazuka Seishirou supposed to be?

In the midst of an unfinished conversation and a fattening meal, he struggled with the thought. .It was ironic that while his prey had no idea of his identity that Seishirou should be grasping for his.

An hour and half later, Seishirou was still attempting to find answers. Subaru had grown even more quiet than usual, and his efforts to provoke a conversation about the past were nearly all spent. Nevertheless, Seishirou was undeterred. He insisted on taking the longer way to the subway station so that he might have more time to probe Subaru for information before they returned to Minatoku. The trip outside the apartment had melted the edges of secrecy wrapped around Subaru. He had just begun to reveal something from his memory, and Seishirou was intent on finishing the conversation by any means.

If this meant making meaningless small talk, then Seishirou had no choice. He looked over his shoulder at Subaru. "Are you cold, Subaru-kun?"

Subaru glanced doubtfully at the ice cream cone in Seishirou's hand and then at the steaming cup of hot chocolate in his own. He said nothing, only shook his head.

He hated small talk. A strong urge was building inside Seishirou to violently force the information out of Subaru. But in one of those enlightening moments of his life, he realized that there would be consequences, and he could not risk frightening Subaru away. It was frustrating to find himself so restrained.

Instead, Seishirou resigned himself to look across a fence that separated them from a public park, while wondering if there was anything he could say to begin a conversation.

Screams of delight echoed in the air as children frolicked in the melting snow. Seishirou saw nothing worthwhile. Subaru, on the other hand was curiously watching them fling snow at each other. Seishirou wondered what his prey saw that he did not as Subaru's eyes followed one of the children. A little girl raced toward an indifferent parent at a bench under the snowy arms of a tree.

And then something changed in Subaru's expression. He momentarily lost his breath, and his eyes widened. He had stopped walking entirely and looked forward from where he stood petrified.

"Is something the matter?" asked Seishirou, who could not figure out what had been so interesting about the scene.

Subaru barely shifted his eyes. "That tree."

He walked back to where Subaru stood and looked over his shoulder. In the snow-dusted landscape, the tree that stood over the parent and child first appeared no different from the others. But a careful look revealed to him details that he recognized at once: light brown bark, skeletal and sinewy boughs, and twigs with amputated nubs that once held flowers.

"That's a sakura tree, Subaru-kun. Do you like sakura?"

Subaru was mute as he kept his eyes on the tree.

"They're beautiful in the spring." Seishirou continued, heedless of the silence that had fallen over him. "Perhaps I should take you to Ueno Park, then. The sakura are in full bloom—the entire sky looks bright pink."

Subaru gasped and turned from the park to face Seishirou. His eyes were dilated with horror. "Do a lot of people die in the spring!?"

Seishirou was stunned. The same wild look of fear that he had seen on New Year's Eve was on Subaru's face now. "No, why would you think that, Subaru-kun?"

Subaru frantically looked around to make sure the street was clear of anyone who might eavesdrop. "Those trees," he whispered, "they drink the blood of the people that are buried underneath. So they turn pink when they bloom."

Seishirou's expression turned serious. "Subaru-kun, where did you hear that from?" Perhaps his memory was not as lost as Seishirou assumed.

Subaru turned away, not knowing what had provoked him to say such a horrible thing. The way that Seishirou stared at him just now—he should have never said anything. Seishirou's impatient gaze pierced into his back, and Subaru struggled for something coherent to say. "I'm sorry, Seishirou-sama. I shouldn't have said what I did about the tree. I don't know why I said it."

He was not going to let Subaru evade the topic so easily. "Then why are you so afraid to see it now?"

Subaru took a deep breath and desperately collected his thoughts. Under Seishirou's demanding eyes, he was helpless. "My first memory…was of waking up underneath that tree. N-Not _that _tree, but one just like it. It was cold out and quiet and dark. And I felt…I don't know, like I had woken up for the first time from a long nightmare. I didn't know what I was, who I was or where I was. I might have still been dreaming."

"But you weren't," Seishirou remarked without any of his previous sensitivity.

Subaru shook his head. "No…but I still wasn't sure if I was awake at all. Not 'awake' like everyone else. I'd see my reflection in a mirror and think I was looking at someone else through a window. People would sometimes ask me who I was, and I didn't understand. Am I someone?"

"Of course you are, Subaru-kun," Seishirou answered, not entirely sure if he had been asked a question at all. "Everyone is _someone_."

Subaru looked back up at the tree, and fought down a hot surge of tears. "But everyone had something that I didn't. And when I realized that there was something wrong with me…I went back to that tree to try to wake up from it. I never did."

_But how can you know why the sakura are pink? _Seishirou sternly asked the question in his mind, but as Subaru watched the frozen tree in dejection, he could not say it aloud. There were other things that he wanted to ask: the bandages, the plastic bracelet he found on Subaru's wrist, the gap of time that had reduced the former onmyouji to this helpless creature. And in the silence, Seishirou also felt an itch to say something trivial. He wanted to remind Subaru that his hot chocolate was getting cold, that they should hurry to the station soon or that the parent was no longer so indifferent and was quickly ushering the little girl away from their intense stares.

The words never left Seishirou's mouth. In the end, he said nothing and ate his ice cream as Subaru looked at the tree in vain. He laid a hand on the boy's shoulder, but Subaru barely acknowledged him. He was busy searching for something in that tree, and Seishirou envied the sakura for the answers it might have contained.

There could have been many things locked away beneath its bark: the depravity of the cherry blossoms or maybe a clue to Subaru's hazy past. Above all, he could see that Subaru was searching for the validation that he really was awake. And Seishirou realized that it was something that no one, least of all a common sakura tree in the park, could know for certain.


	4. The Bracelet

I know. It's been a really long time since I updated this. College is fun like that (and so are full time jobs). That aside, I'm not going to abandon this story (I already swore on a stack of TB manga, that's as good as a blood oath for me) as the writing demons will not leave my brain until I finish it. And they bite. And it hurts. Thanks to all the reviewers who have encouraged me to continue writing!!

_**Nara Luisa:**__ Seishirou is the definition of sensual (holds up a dictionary to prove it). As for "this and that" all you need to do is read my other stories and you'll have an idea of whether it will happen or not._

_**Aiseki Anrui:**__ Thank you! I'm happy the story is having that effect, and I'll definitely be keeping the suspense coming! In what way did you expect Seishirou to be OOC? It's always fun looking at the various ways that people portray him in fics. _

_**MeyRevived2:**__ 1) Thanks! I really wanted to get that scene right! 2) But I've already put Suby in a dress in another story (which was worth at least 50 fangirl points.) 3) The boy needs to put on weight for all our sakes. _

_**Ruth: **__I had fun writing that bit with Seishirou dressing Subaru up—as Meirav has said it really is the fangirl's favorite game. Seishirou discovering his own identity in relationship to what's happened with Subaru can certainly go either way (or both). _

* * *

**The Hall of Broken Mirrors**

**IV. The Bracelet**

The study was Seishirou's least favorite room. It was small relative to the others in the apartment, and there was no window, which left it to be illuminated by an artificial light that reflected off the bleached walls in a way that irritated his remaining eye. He had wasted little effort in even furnishing the room. There was only the black wooden desk, a chair and a table in the corner that erected the fax machine to a height of prominence. If there was just one purpose that this room might have served, it was to provide a separate space for the faxes that ordered him to spill blood.

It was behind the closed door of this sparsely furnished, poorly lit and uncomfortable room that he had spent nearly all of his morning. On top of the desk at which he worked there was a round clock with large Roman numerals. At every second, it let out a jarring click like a pebble being cast onto a boulder. He absentmindedly wondered how many thousands of clicks had transpired since he began piecing together the details of the elaborate puzzle that was now laid out in front of him, and he wondered how many more would come before he had reached a satisfying conclusion.

After their conversation in the park, Subaru had been more forthcoming with details of his lost days on the streets. However, these pieces of information were disoriented and hazy at best—the color of the walls at a subway station where he slept, a shanty town of cardboard boxes he where he had wandered, nameless shelters that did too little—and Seishirou would not be surprised if all of this was useless to him.

He nonetheless recorded what he could in a thin, red notebook so that he could revisit a detail should it become important. He had just finished writing the last of what Subaru had mentioned—a train station that matched the description of a place not far from the alley where he had found the boy. As Seishirou looked back on his spidery handwriting, he was displeased to find almost as many question marks written on the sheets of paper as words. It was a stark reminder of just how little he now knew about his prey.

He did not even know how long it had been since Subaru had woken up beneath the sakura. Without this key detail, Seishirou knew that he was at a disadvantage. He unpleasantly reminded himself that if too much time had passed since Subaru's memory loss and disappearance into the underworld of Tokyo, the Sumeragi clan would have reason to grow suspicious. The family was hardly a threat to Seishirou, but it could certainly become an obstacle for him as he sought answers to the numerous question marks in his notebook. It was for that reason that he would have to proceed cautiously, all the while keeping Subaru hidden as much as he could.

Seishirou read and reread the notebook, and after the clock above him had let out several hundred more loud ticks, he concluded that it was time to return to what was probably the only worthwhile clue that he had. He opened the drawer on the right side of the desk, and pulled out a thin piece of plastic. Seishirou had stolen from Subaru's wrist four days ago on the night he had brought him to his apartment. Since that time, he had puzzled over its significance. The bracelet itself was useless; it had been warped and broken beyond its utility. However, beneath the plastic surface there was a strip of paper with dark stains that concealed typewritten words. Subaru had told him it was from this bracelet that he had derived his name. Someone had typed the word "SUBARU" onto this plastic bracelet. That meant that there was someone who knew who Subaru was, and Seishirou would stop at nothing to find out how and why.

Seishirou scrutinized the bracelet up and down with a magnifying glass for anything else that might be printed on the paper. He had done this many times since he had taken the bracelet from Subaru, but it was all to no avail. The stains on the paper obscured the precious words he sought, and no amount of inspection would change this. Upon realizing that this attempt would end just like the previous ones, Seishirou knew that the time had come to take a risk.

He lifted a pair of scissors from the desk surface and skillfully cut along the very edge of the bracelet. The plastic shell peeled apart, exposing the strip of paper for the first time since it had been typed upon. Immediately after its liberation, he captured the paper with a pair of tweezers and pulled it completely out of the plastic.

For seconds Seishirou did nothing more than stare icily at the fragile strip and the secrets hidden on it. He looked for something—anything—on the surface in case his plan backfired and his most valuable lead was destroyed, but the stains and grime were just as dark and unyielding as ever. At last he surrendered to their impenetrability and turned his attention away from the strip of paper.

Exiled to a corner on the desk were a shallow bowl and a transparent green bottle. He reached for them both, and as he unscrewed the cap on the bottle it let out a hazardous, sharp hiss. Seishirou filled the bowl halfway with fizzing liquid, and he watched the carbonated bubbles leap to the surface like a swarm of ravenous piranhas. Without anymore hesitation, he lifted the temporarily neglected paper and submerged it in the bowl.

At once, the bubbles swarmed in its wake and the once clear fluid became polluted with a cloud of filth. He watched with an urge to rescue the fragile paper from complete annihilation, while at the same time, he found it ironic that the only valuable piece of evidence in this mystery could be destroyed by nothing more than club soda. Seconds later he realized that nothing resembling running ink or dissolving pieces of paper was carried away by the harsh bubbles. The sides of his mouth twitched into a smile at this small success. The paper and the ink on it would remain intact as the weak acids in the club soda lifted the grime.

Nevertheless, Seishirou could see that the stains were hardly any lighter than they had been before. They permeated deep into the paper and it would take several more hours for him to read anything on it. He sat in his chair with an impatient itch eating at him from the inside. He simply could not wait for that amount of time now that he had made progress! Seishirou set his eye on the open red notebook that he had left on the desk, and unable to remain in his seat for a moment longer, he strolled out of the study with it tucked under his arm.

He found Subaru in a corner of the living room—almost exactly where he had left the boy following breakfast three hours ago. As he gazed at him from the hallway, Seishirou reflected on how peculiar it was to see Subaru curled up in his armchair given that a year and a half ago he was trapped with only moments to live inside the deadly net of his maboroshi. Had circumstances varied, had he been given several seconds longer to end their bet, he could have killed Sumeragi Subaru then and there. Instead, the boy was sitting in his living room and staring at the pictures in one of his old veterinary books as if that critical moment had been obliterated along with his memory. Such ordinary acts like Subaru reading his books and eating meals with him had not yet lost their ability to impress and frustrate Seishirou.

With the new situation still in mind, he crossed into the living room with the gentlest smile he could summon for the boy. The instant his foot fell on the pine floor, Subaru's head snapped up from the book like that of a startled rabbit. Seishirou's smile briefly morphed into a dark grin; Subaru had shown this feral response a number of times when he entered a room. In spite of the timid and docile behavior that remained within Subaru, living on the streets had brought these intriguing changes to him.

"Do you like the book?"

Subaru's shoulders relaxed at hearing his voice, and he shyly smiled back. "Um, yes. The animals… I've even seen some of them when I was living…outside…but some of them…" Subaru paused like a child about to ask a silly question and pointed at a picture of a horse captured in full gallop. "Are these real?"

"Of course," Seishirou chuckled. "You ride them." He stifled a full laugh when Subaru's eyes enlarged with wonder. His memory loss had left him seeing much of the world outside of the city through a newborn's eyes, and while it confounded Seishirou as to why Subaru remembered some things and not others, he found it adorable.

As Subaru stared at the horse doubtfully, a thought came to Seishirou to directly ask him about what he remembered about the bracelet. Subaru had been visibly upset whenever he mentioned it before. He could not see why the worthless piece of plastic had meant so much to Subaru, but it did nonetheless, and that made it far more difficult for Seishirou to ask about than anything else. Perhaps now that Subaru had been more willing to share information with him, he could press the subject more firmly.

"Subaru-kun," he began. Subaru took his eyes off the book and gave him his full attention. "The bracelet that you had, the one you said had your name on it. Do you remember any other words?"

Subaru looked down and played with the sleeves of his tight black shirt. "No, no words."

"Anything?" pried Seishirou. He would not be able to believe that he had just spent hours hunting for what he already knew on that piece of crap bracelet.

"Squiggles," he answered, while straining to remember. "They were hard to read, but they weren't words. And there was a picture—a really small one."

"Could you draw it?" Seishirou impatiently asked.

"I'm sorry, Seishirou-san," he replied in a soft and mournful voice. "I didn't know what it was. I usually only looked at the name." He looked up at Seishirou in alarm. "Do you think that it was important?"

Seishirou fought down the disappointment that he would have to wait several more hours for the answers to his questions. "No. It probably isn't important at all," he lied. He then turned his determination back to the notebook under his arm, and he started for the door. "There are a few errands that need my attention. I'll be away for several hours."

Subaru nodded wordlessly, and he gave the boy a playful smile as he opened the front door. "When I return, I expect to see that you've eaten half the pocky I bought you. I meant what I said yesterday about weight."

"Yes, Seishirou-san," he answered in a slightly cheerier voice.

Subaru stared at the front door of the apartment long after Seishirou had left. Before that night four days ago he only knew a life spent alone, and now that he was by himself, he did not know what to do. Seishirou had told him on more than one occasion that he was free to explore any room in the apartment with the exception of the study. He was welcome to anything he wanted and expected to eat amounts of food that he could not conceive.

It was not that he doubted that Seishirou was sincere when he said these things; he was only afraid to believe that they were true. Few people had ever helped him, and those who did often expected him to do something frightening in return. But Seishirou had been so kind to him, and all that he asked from Subaru was information so that he could give him what he wanted the most. He could not understand Seishirou's intentions, and it terrified him to think that they were less than pure because he had begun to like Seishirou.

He liked the way the older man said his name with such confidence. He liked how he smiled at him. Above all, he liked Seishirou's eyes because they were uncommon. It was not that they were so strangely mismatched. Seishirou was the first person to look at him as if he was not a piece of trash; the older man gazed at him in an intense way that made him feel like he was somehow important. Those eyes dissolved Subaru's concerns, and he would tell him everything that he could remember and some things that he could not if Seishirou would only keep looking at him.

As the slow and agonizingly quiet moments passed, Subaru pulled his eyes away from the motionless door and acknowledged that it would be some time before Seishirou would walk through it again. He had lost interest with the book lying against his lap and mused whether or not he should go to the kitchen and eat the pocky so that Seishirou would be pleased with him. But as he considered that, he felt a heavy pang in his stomach. He was still sick from the amount that he ate at breakfast, and he could not make himself to do it, even for Seishirou.

Unable to walk to the kitchen and hesitant to go into any of the other rooms in the apartment, Subaru set aside the book and snuggled into the thick comforter on top of the sofa, which had been his bed for the last few days. The same wave of exhaustion that had plagued him the day before at Shibuya settled over him now, and he surrendered to it with a sigh. When he woke up, Seishirou would be there, and Subaru would force himself to eat every stick of the pocky under his mismatched gaze.

* * *

Three hours, a subway ride, and 10000 wasted yen later, Seishirou had developed a sincere dislike for Tokyo and all its homeless. While he was no outsider to the underworld lingering in the forgotten corners of the city, he had never walked down an alley lined with cardboard boxes. He had never visited parks where makeshift blue tarps were erected, and he certainly never sought out any of the people that occupied them.

While most of them had been quiet and unhelpful, the man standing in front of him disgusted him more with every word he spoke in his thick Kansai accent.

"Yeah, I've seen a kid with bandages on his arms About a week—no, week and a half ago," the man grunted. His rag-covered arms swayed upward to make a grab for the 1000 yen bill Seishirou held in the air and missed.

"What color were his eyes?"

The man picked his ear and gave him a yellow-toothed grin. "How much cash you have, mister?"

Seishirou pushed the money back into his pocket and turned away with disgust.

The man fidgeted after him. "Hold on! Green! They were green!" He halted and reluctantly turned to face him again. "Damn unnatural shade, too."

Seishirou reached into his pocket, this time for 2000 yen. Through his sunglasses, he glared at the vagrant's bloodshot eyes, and a forbidding smile curled across his lips. "If you are wasting my time, you will regret it."

The man only leered back. "I've seen him wandering around the park. Those bandages were soaked through with blood—he was covered with it. I dragged him to the closest shelter to get it looked at. The kid didn't wanna go, but those cuts didn't look good." He paused to scratch the unkempt stubble framing his mouth and licked his lips. "He was a cute little thing."

Something deep inside of Seishirou that he could not hear snapped, and the man's smile vanished the moment his back shot against the nearest tree. He knew exactly what the expression on that vagrant's face meant. The image of that _vermin_ violating Subaru while he bled in the park sent an unfamiliar rush of blood through his veins.

The man sputtered against Seishirou's unmerciful hold on his neck. "Whoa, mister, you've got it wrong! I didn't touch him, he was just a kid!" Seishirou's narrowed eyes remained unconvinced, and the man groaned as he was thrown against the tree a second time. "Alright! I did the pretty boy a favor and wanted him to return it! Just a kiss, that's all I was after! One little kiss! And I didn't even get that. The kid looked like he was going to cry, and those shelter hags chased me away. Now let me go, you crazy bastard!"

Seishirou tightened his crushing grip on the man's throat, but reason was beginning to seep back into his mind. They were on a secluded corner of the park, but it was a public setting, nonetheless, and the sun was still radiating at the top of the sky. His instincts as an assassin took over, and he scolded himself for his loss of self-control.

He would have gladly punctured this man's heart and watched him bleed over the soggy grass. Instead, Seishirou threw down the vagrant and glared coldly as the man cursed and squirmed at his feet. He let two crumpled 1000 yen bills fall to the ground. "Where is this shelter?"

* * *

A paradox overshadowed everything in the day room. The air was no colder than it had been in the rest of the building, but he was fighting back shivers. The ceiling lamps poured blinding light over the room, yet everything he saw was obscured by a haze of darkness. There were over a dozen others with him, some sitting only several meters away, but the room was empty and isolating, and he felt so utterly alone.

He sat at a table next to a colorful palette of paint and a large, blank sheet of paper. He could not help staring through the paper and at the walls that enveloped him. They were as colorless and bleak as the sheet in his hands, and he wondered if the walls ever had a beginning or ending edge like the paper. They stretched from room to room in an endless expanse of white, and he found the more time he spent within them, the more vacant his mind became.

A sharp rhythm of clicking issued from the glittering tile floors, and a woman entered the corner of his vision. She was dressed in the same sterile color of white that for a brief moment, he thought she emerged from the wall. However, her deep pink lips and long ebony hair rebelled against the emptiness, and with relief he knew that this was not so.

"_Subaru-san, it's time for lunch!"_ she sang cheerily while placing a plastic tray in front of him. Her dark eyes caught the blank sheet of paper in his hands. _"Oh…Subaru-san, you didn't paint anything? It's supposed to be very relaxing. I'm sure that you'd create something beautiful if you'd only try."_

He continued to stare past her at the wall without a reply. She gave him an indulgent smile and patted his shoulder. _"I'll tell you what—after you finish your lunch, I'll help you get started. How does that sound, Subaru-san?"_

He looked up at her for the first time. Her smile remained in place, and he found that he was somehow comforted by it. He could not remember lips so pink and vibrant or eyes that shimmered with as much cheer. He was immediately confused, however, when he realized that her attention was focused solely on him.

His voice had grown withered and quiet from disuse. _"Who is Subaru-san?"_

Her thin black eyebrows arched in surprise, but the smile remained fixed on her face. _"You are, Subaru-san. That's your name."_

"_My name?"_ he echoed, unfamiliar with the word.

"_Yes, your name. What people call you,"_ she explained patiently. The woman bent over the table, and gently took his right hand in hers. Her fingers brushed the thin plastic bracelet that hung from his wrist. _"Do you see this? This bracelet has your name typed on it. That's how I know that you're Subaru-san."_

He gazed at the plastic wrapped at the base of his hand. _"Do you have a bracelet?"_

She was delighted by the question. _"My name is Katashi Naomi."_

He fidgeted uncomprehendingly in his chair. _"You have two names? But how do you know which one is yours?"_

"_They're both mine. The first one is my family name, and the second one is what my friends call me."_

He touched a finger to the kanji printed on the bracelet. _"Does Subaru-san have another name?"_

She giggled back. _"Of course. Everyone has at least two names. Let's see...huh? That's strange…"_ She rotated the bracelet twice over his pale wrist, but found no other words preceding his first name. _"I can't find it on here. Just a moment, Subaru-san."_ She stood up straight and turned to an older woman in white. _"Excuse me, Nakuma-san?"_

The other woman faced her with a grimace, but she deliberately ignored her ill mood. _"Nakuma-san, I couldn't help noticing that Subaru-san's surname isn't on his bracelet. Is this a mistake?"_

"_No mistake. That boy doesn't have a surname," _she answered with mirthless smile.

"_But, there must be something in the records. I'm sure he has—"_

"_Katashi-chan. This one is a new arrival—hasn't cooperated, hasn't even spoken a word aside from nonsense. Sometimes there's nothing we can do for people like him but waste our time." _Nakuma whispered harshly before leaving the woman baffled and alone.

When she turned back to him, his eyes were back on the walls, staring vacantly into the stark white paint. She hesitantly placed a hand on his shoulder and smiled. _"It's alright, Subaru-san. Even if you have only one name, it's still yours. And if you ever forget it you can look at your bracelet and remember that you'll always be Subaru. And I'll just have one name as well so that you won't be alone. You can call me Naomi, and we'll be friends. Would you like that?"_

A faint smile spread across his lips, and her eyes alighted. _"Good! Now hurry and eat your lunch so we can get started on your painting. I'd hate for Nakuma-san to walk back here and see that you haven't done anything!"_

He clutched the plastic bracelet against his heart.

…_You'll always be Subaru…_

* * *

As he awoke his first unconscious inclination was to hold his right wrist and feel the inanimate touch of plastic on his fingers. But as had been the case many times over the past four days, Subaru only found naked skin where the bracelet should have been, and that had been enough to send chills rippling through him and wake him completely.

He pushed aside the disorientation the flashing images from his dream had placed in him. He ignored the desperation that came with waking after these sorts of dreams that begged him not to forget what he had experienced. He disregarded the sense of futility that came with the desperation, which was futile because Subaru had already begun to forget, and he would never remember. All that remained was a terrible ache in the cavity of his chest as his hand continued to find nothing hanging from his wrist.

Subaru buried his head against his knees and battled the remnant shivers in his body. He did not know why the loss had pained him more at this moment than it had in the last few days, only that it did, and there was nothing he could do to dispel it. The bracelet was his only source of identity. It was true that he doubted that the name on the bracelet was truly his, but it remained with him for so long, stubbornly refusing to change. Even as the kanji name written on it was gradually blotted away by dirt, it was a confirmation that at least for a moment he had evidence of an identity.

He tried to calm himself by thinking that he no longer needed it. He had Seishirou, and the older man would call him by that name with a voice that relaxed him just as gazing at the bracelet had. If he had gone to bed and woken the following morning with absolutely no idea of what he was to be called, Seishirou would be there to remind him, wouldn't he?

Subaru told himself again and again that this had to be true because if it was not, then he was vulnerable to losing himself again. He shivered at that possibility. The very thought of him forgetting what little memories he had built from the empty void in his mind placed a sharp pain behind his eyes. No, he would do anything to prevent that from happening!

He continued to hug his knees and took in deep breaths of air to pacify his speeding heartbeat. The thoughts that plagued his senses gradually abated to his relief, for he knew that he could not think about those frightening possibilities for too long without becoming consumed by the grief.

Yet he was horrified to discover that the pain behind his eyes had not dissipated, but was spreading, and Subaru realized that he was helpless against it.

* * *

As Seishirou impatiently waited amid the chaos of the cramped shelter, his thoughts continued to race over his reaction at the park. He never cared whether a person should live or die, yet the instant that street trash gave him that self-satisfied smirk, he felt all the barriers that kept him from caring fall away. He wanted that man dead, and he wanted to be the one to kill him. But why would he kill him for something that he never did to a boy that meant so little?

Subaru was nothing more than an object, but he was _his_ object, _his_ toy, nonetheless. If another man had raped him, touched him or merely left a bruise on him, then his property would have been left defiled. Subaru was his regardless of what he remembered, regardless of the time that had passed. From the moment that Seishirou marked him as his prey, he was the only one that could play with him and break him as he wished.

"Hello, young man? Azumi-chan said you're here about that green-eyed boy from a week ago?" An elderly woman's voice inquired, breaking him away from his trail of thought.

Seishirou turned to the woman with his best false smile. "He was here then?"

"Friend of yours?" she asked with harsher inflection in her voice. "I saw what was done to him. Just when I thought I've seen every kind of abuse in this city."

Seishirou found himself caught off balance with the woman's sudden change in behavior. "Abuse?"

"Oh, so not such a good friend then?" she bit with a wry smile. "I've seen kids his age, some younger, with cuts on their arms. The circumstances usually drive them to do it to themselves, but that boy? Only someone with a really twisted mind could cut that poor kid's hands like that."

All the false civility had fled from Seishirou's face when he stared at the old woman. "Tell me who did it."

She searched his cold expression before her own softened, and she dismissed her suspicion of him. "The boy wouldn't say anything when I asked. We cleaned up the blood all over his arms and face, properly bandaged his hands, gave him a hot meal, a place to stay for the night and kept the perverts away from him. There wasn't much else that anyone could do for him."

"And after that night you just let him back on the streets," remarked Seishirou under his breath.

The old woman had heard him. "If you haven't noticed, we aren't at liberty to take in every person that comes into this shelter," she snapped, raising an upbraiding, bony finger at him. "There are never enough beds, not enough food! We only take the ones that are ill or injured. I tried to do everything I could for that boy in the short time I had to do it. I tried to have him go to a clinic to have those cuts stitched up, but it was hard enough just to have him accept new bandages. I think that he had enough of doctors and hospitals."

Seishirou was growing weary of this irritable old woman and her cryptic words. "And what the hell does that mean?"

"He was wearing a bracelet—one of those plastic medical ones from Tokyo Mercy Hospital. It had their symbol on it—you know, the snake eating itself with a cross in the center. He was probably just discharged when the wounds reopened."

For a moment, he said nothing, surprised that he had never considered such an obvious conclusion. "Are you sure it was from a hospital?"

"Look, young man. I may be getting old, but I'm not senile. I know what I saw, and I don't appreciate being interrogated in my own shelter while they're people far more deserving of my help! Now if you're quite done, I have more important things to attend to." Before Seishirou could retort, she turned away and walked toward the end of the room. "I better not see that boy back here with more cuts on his hands!"

Seishirou watched her disappear around a corner toward the hallway in a mystified silence. Could that piece of filthy plastic that he had agonized over for days be a simple medical bracelet? Subaru had never mentioned a hospital in their conversations—surely he would have said something about it if he was able to speak of sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street.

If he remembered it.

He rushed out of the shelter and broke into a sprint toward the subway station. The faster he ran, the closer Seishirou felt himself in sight of a resolution. The broken pieces of Subaru's past were beginning assemble. His ruined hands, his loss of memory—what if they had occurred at the same time? He only needed to see that bracelet. If Subaru was hospitalized he could find the source of his ailment and the reason why he had suddenly lost his memory, only to wake up beneath a sakura tree. It was all just beyond his reach.

The travel back to Azabu was the longest he had ever experienced. When he burst through the front door of his apartment the voices of the vagrant and the old woman were flooding his thoughts so quickly that his mind felt like it was drowning. Only when he had arrived at the glimmering doorknob at the end of the hall did Seishirou's pulse stall with anticipation. The bowl of club soda rested untouched at the center of the desk. As he approached, he saw that the fluid was now completely clouded with filth that masked the strip of paper within. He was too impatient and excited at the promise of an answer after four days of questions to bother with the pair of tweezers. Seishirou reached into the bowl and closed his fingers around a soggy piece of paper.

He ignored the droplets of contaminated soda raining from his hand onto the desk. All that Seishirou saw was the faded ink that had emerged from the lightened stains on the paper.

**SUBARU #50012157 **

At the right end of the paper was the ouroboros, the snake consuming itself, with a stout cross in the middle. It was the symbol of Tokyo Mercy Hospital. The old woman was right; Subaru had come from a hospital.

He read the strip of paper more times than he could count, wondering how he could have overlooked the bracelet's purpose. Subaru's hands were bandaged when he found him. He had even considered a head injury among the possibilities that caused the boy's amnesia. Perhaps there was nothing intriguing at all about what happened to Subaru; maybe he had only been willing to believe there was. In his boredom had Seishirou hoped that this mystery was more complicated than it was?

A crash reverberated against the wooden floor, and Seishirou looked up from the paper to notice that in his haste, he had left the study door cracked open. It was then that he realized he had never seen Subaru when he entered his apartment. The paper dropped from his hand, and he went to the open door.

"Subaru-kun?" he called as sweetly as he could in spite of his newfound disappointment.

There was no answer. There was no sound at all. Seishirou closed the door behind him and took several steps toward the living room. "Subaru-kun? Are you there?"

He was about to call for the boy a third time when he felt something warm and sticky beneath his foot. His eye met a smudged trail of deep red blood. Seishirou hurried along it. "Subaru-kun! Where are you?"

With every step that he took there were larger streaks of blood coating the wooden panels of the floor. He followed it into the bathroom, where the silence dissolved into quiet sobbing. A bloody hand print was smeared across the translucent shower door. Beyond it, he could see a small shadow in the corner.

"Subaru-kun, are you hurt?"

Subaru choked out another cry behind the shower and did not move. Seishirou cautiously approached. "Subaru-kun." The door shrieked as Seishirou pulled it open.

Subaru sat facing the tile walls surrounded by blood. His shoulders quivered with each hiccupping sob that wracked through his body. "Sei…shirou…san," he whispered.

Seishirou knelt outside the shower. He lost his breath as Subaru shifted in the blood. His face was covered with it. Viscous crimson flowed from his nose and coated his lips. With each fresh sob it streamed from the edges of his eyes.

When he parted his lips, the blood gushed from his mouth. "Help…"

That single word was followed by a miserable cry, and his head bent forward. The rest of his body followed like a limp doll, and he collapsed in the blood. Seishirou stared at the motionless hands that hung at his sides. Fresh cuts smirked back at him in the shape of two inverted pentagrams.


	5. No One

Hey look at that! Kyou-chan got off her ass and updated! Aside from hell needing to freeze over first, I've been working hard on this story since the last update to post this new chapter. I know, I know, it takes forever for an update, but between college, work, Grad school college applications and conferences I don't have as much time as I would like. But I will never ever ever abandon this story (strikes dramatic pose). I love all of you who have stayed with this story in spite of the slow updates!

I love my reviewers!

_**yukiko07:**__ Yeah, I'm known for evil apocalyptic cliffhangers. Part of my charm ^^. Thank you so much for your comment, it made me SOOO happy!_

_**Calbee:**__ They're my favorites too (and favorite pairing of all time!) so of course I'll keep writing!_

_**recipe for insanity:**__ I'm really sorry I can't give you a timely update. If circumstances were a little less busy, you know I would. But it means a lot to me that you're still reading the story, regardless (and reviewing!)._

_**laustic:**__ I think he's so in denial that the word "denial" isn't a good enough word to describe it!_

_**kingleby:**__ (Rubs head) Ah, sorry about cliffhangers, I can't help myself! I'm putting a lot of work into Seishirou so he's more complex—just like you said, with feelings he doesn't (or can't acknowledge). _

_**lysyru:**__ Yeah, you're completely right. I really wish this fandom was as active as it was a few years ago. That doesn't stop me from writing, of course! And readers like you keep me going, so together we can drive the fandom! Your review made me happy muchly! _

**

* * *

The Hall of Broken Mirrors**

**V. No One**

Hours passed, and the entire apartment darkened. Seishirou sat in his armchair waiting for a change to come over Subaru's face that was not a trick of the flames dancing in the fireplace. Subaru was as white as bone; his entire body was unmoving, and Seishirou often had to check if he was breathing at all. The blood loss had taken a more severe effect than Seishirou expected. Had he bled any more than he did, even a hospital would be useless to him.

That was not to say that a hospital would help him now in his current, grave condition. In fact, Seishirou had a mounting suspicion that it had played a role in reducing his prey to this pathetic state. He could not know how or why this might be the case. He only knew that he could hardly trust any belief that he held prior to discovering Subaru covered in blood, and that included the idea that the hospital had good intentions. He had thought he had found all the answers he sought after, he thought he finally had all the pieces to this puzzle, and it was only a matter of assembling them to understand why Subaru was so damaged. He thought wrong. There was a new piece now, and it did not fit with any of the others. This left him back in the exact same place he was on the eve of the New Year; inescapably confused with a comatose boy in his living room.

With the hospital discarded as a medical option for Subaru, Seishirou could only trust his own capabilities, and so he used his knowledge as a former veterinarian to tend to Subaru. He cleaned away the blood soaking his skin and wrapped his hands in bandages. The livid scars that once lined the pentagrams placed on Subaru's hands were now open wounds. He watched blood spill out of those thick red gashes, which audaciously challenged his ownership of Subaru. His mark; the mark of the Sakurazukamori had been turned against him by this sickness afflicting Subaru. He looked at the inverted pentagrams on his prey's hands and was mystified by them. He never thought it possible to find himself at a loss with his own magic.

He lifted himself out of the chair and dragged its ottoman to the side of the sofa to better view Subaru. Beneath the blanket, Subaru wore a set of black satin pajamas with dark green cuffs—something that Seishirou had carefully chosen for the boy days before. Just above the blanket, Subaru's collar bone protruded against his white torso in spite of four days of force-feeding him. Seishirou moved his gaze onto Subaru's unconscious face and saw that underneath his closed eyes were dark crescents that offset his ashen skin.

Morbidly, Seishirou wondered if this was what Subaru would look like when he killed him. Seishirou had seen the faces of the dead more often than a full moon, and they were usually contorted and gruesome to the eye. There had only been two people who held an ethereal grace in death, like dolls left abandoned in the snow. His mother and Sumeragi Hokuto had been breathtaking just moments after he murdered them, but as he stared down at the sofa, he found that Subaru was far more beautiful. His face was smooth and peaceful and extraordinarily delicate like clay. Yet the one feature Seishirou adored most about his prey was left concealed under thick eyelashes.

Seishirou lifted a moist washcloth from the coffee table and absentmindedly dabbed the corners of Subaru's eyes. He could not remove the image of blood obscuring those stunning large eyes from his mind, nor how crimson streams rushed down his face as the boy sobbed. As he brushed them with the washcloth, Seishirou thought of imaginary tears emerging from Subaru's eyes, and he wondered whether they would be red or colorless.

Instead, when those eyelashes fluttered open, he saw two thin slivers of green. Without the strength to move any other part of his body, Subaru opened his eyes, but flinched with pain the moment the light of the fireplace flooded into his vision. As he shivered miserably on the sofa, Seishirou placed the washcloth completely over his eyes.

"Do your eyes hurt, Subaru-kun? Just keep the cloth over them for the moment."

"Seishirou-san…" Subaru made a weak attempt to rise from the couch, but was easily kept down by the gentle push of Seishirou's hand.

"Careful, you've lost a lot of blood," he interjected. Seishirou fought down the impatience that was beckoning him to berate the boy with questions, and then added, "You need to rest."

A tiny sobbing noise left Subaru, and tears—colorless tears—rolled from the edges of washcloth over his eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…Seishirou-san…I'm…I'm…"

Seishirou had expected this reaction and had planned his part accordingly. He placed a hand against Subaru's face and wiped away a tear. "What have you to be sorry for, Subaru-kun?"

Subaru's voice remained weak. "Because…Seishirou-san…I should've told you. I didn't think it was going to happen again…I would've told you…there's something wrong with me."

"Then this has happened before," concluded Seishirou, confirming what he had already surmised from his excursions in the city that afternoon.

He felt a small movement of Subaru's head under his fingers, which he interpreted as a nod. "Only one time before….that I can remember. I didn't think…it would happen again."

Seishirou could no longer suppress his questions. "How did it happen? What were you doing when it did happen?"

Fresh tears rushed down his face. "I-I don't know. Both times, I wasn't doing anything strange…and I just felt pain. My eyes, they hurt, and the pain spread everywhere. And then my hands," he managed to lift one of his arms, "there was so much blood…I thought I was going to die…"

Seishirou quieted and waited for Subaru's tears to subside as he took in his frightened words. He would have believed his affliction to be a strong curse, but there were too many problems with such a conclusion. To his knowledge, there was no curse that could interfere with magic as deep as the marks on Subaru's hands. No curse could account for Subaru's complete loss of memory. As Sakurazukamori, there were spells he knew—and used on Subaru—to hide memories but not obliterate them. Nothing about what happened to Subaru made any sense.

Subaru stilled once more, and with his face concealed beneath the washcloth, Seishirou did not know whether he was asleep or still awake. He began to withdraw his hand from Subaru's face when he felt him shift against his fingertips.

"Seishirou-san…" he whispered sheepishly. "If you...if you don't want me here anymore, I'll leave."

"Subaru-kun, why would you think that?"

"I didn't tell you. And when it happened…all the blood…it was everywhere. And if it happens again...Seishirou-san, I'm already burdening you, and I should leave."

Seishirou sighed and stroked Subaru's hair from his face. "Don't be foolish. I won't let you leave for something you can't help, especially if you're ill. Besides, I gave you my word that I would help you find your identity, and I'll take care of you until that happens." Subaru was not going to escape from him, not when the circumstances became so intriguing.

"But…but…the blood," Subaru whimpered.

Seishirou stared down at him curiously. Subaru had been near death, and the only matter bothering him was the mess his blood made. Such a trivial concern—as if the floors in this apartment were a stranger to blood. "Don't worry. It's not important."

Subaru's frail fingers pushed the washcloth aside. His eyes were swollen and wet with tears. "Th-thank you, Seishirou-san. Thank you so much…"

Seishirou let his thumb wander over the tight bandages on Subaru's hand. "Try to relax now, Subaru-kun. I'll be back with something for you to eat in a moment."

He stood up from the ottoman, but Subaru placed his fingers over Seishirou's hand. "Seishirou-san…I…I just don't understand."

Seishirou smiled. "Rest now, Subaru-kun." He slid the washcloth back over Subaru's eyes and left the darkened room.

* * *

He squirmed against the hard plastic chair that he had been forced into by the tall woman in white. The tables had been spirited away leaving a wide stretch of white tiles lining the bare dayroom. It hurt his eyes to look at those tiles, which reflected the fluorescent lights as brilliantly as tin metal. Nevertheless, he preferred to stare at the floor until he went blind than look at the ten others sitting around the circle.

They were men of all ages, pale and subverted. Some fidgeted to a rhythm he could not hear, while others spoke in hushed voices that were not meant to carry beyond their own spheres of solitude. All of their eyes were lifeless, and in the reflected radiance they were as vapid as the white robes that clothed them.

He was afraid to look at their eyes because it would cause his thoughts to break into untraceable fragments. But moreover, it frightened him to be the attention of those blank stares because he was noticed and exposed as an outsider with his bright, green eyes.

His discomfort was far from alleviated when the attention turned to the tall woman who stepped in the middle of the circle. As she walked, she cast a long shadow against the bright tiles. Those that were hurriedly whispering quieted as she forced a smile around the circle.

"_Hello everyone, I'm sure that you all enjoyed the wonderful breakfast this morning, but now it's time for us to begin."_

A man with unruly black hair sat next to him with his arms crossed. _"That was the worst excuse for sustenance you people have ever forced down my throat, and I'd like to see you stick it in your lyin' mouth!"_

He jumped at the man's sudden outburst and shivered when the woman's eyes focused in their direction. The smile remained pinned on her face, regardless of what his neighbor had just said. His eyes widened when he noticed that she was looking at him and not the man at his side.

"_Let us all welcome Subaru-san to our facility. Please make him feel at home while he's here."_

"_Yeah, you'll welcome him, alright, won't you, you bitch? You'll reach in and rip out his soul like you personally did all these poor bastards!"_

He gasped and turned to the man. _"Wh-what?"_ he cried. He looked around the circle at the other men who were less concerned with this outburst. One twitched in place while another hummed and deliberately looked away.

The woman's smile twitched into a frown for half a second. _"I was just saying that I am Nakuma-san, and that I'll be here to help you. Please listen more carefully."_

"_Help? Help!? Since when have you helped any of us!? I know the truth! I know what you people call 'help'! You'll break him down real slow, and when he's nothing more than a vegetable, you'll suffocate him in his sleep!"_

With wide eyes, he glanced between the man and the commanding woman feeling trapped and small in his plastic chair. He did not know what frightened him more: the ranting of his neighbor or the electricity that sparked in Nakuma's eyes the more that he spoke.

"_Subaru-san. Do you have something to share with us?"_

He shrunk in his seat under her glare, deciding that he was more afraid of Nakuma than the man. _"He…he said you're going to hurt me,"_ he whispered.

"_Subaru-san, __**no one**__ is there,"_ she replied with a sharp look at the man next to him. _"Do you understand? __**No one.**__ And we would never hurt you, the very thought of it is—"_

The man's wild expression turned to him with a flash of incredulity. _"Of course there's no one here! There's just a chair! But wait—who's that sitting in the chair? It's the bastard you screwed over, you filthy lying bitch!"_

He closed his eyes hoping that the harsh voices would leave him the moment the man and Nakuma faded into darkness. But their words wormed into his head; they made his ears pound and his heart race.

"…_we want to help you recover from…"_

"_**Lying bitch!**__ You'll make him worse! You've made them all worse. You'll send your soldiers after him; they'll degrade him and beat him like a dog!"_

"_No, stop!"_ he cried as the man's voice gained strength over Nakuma's. He pressed his palms against his ears.

"_Then they'll hook him up to your machine! I've seen the machine! They'll switch it on and torture him! It'll take all his blood! And when he's nothing more than a husk, you'll have your laugh, won't you, you no good, vindictive, rat-faced BITCH!!"_

He jumped from his chair. _"NO!"_

The others sitting around the circle erupted into shocked whispers as Nakuma tightened her fists. Her eyelids narrowed into black slits and the edges of her lips pulled tight. _"Subaru-san! Sit down, you're upsetting the others!"_

But he had already let the man's inane words infiltrate him. He no longer saw a woman offering assistance, but a demon capable of snapping him in half where he stood. _"No! He says you're going to take my blood! Please! Don't!"_

"_Subaru-san! You have to stop lying—no one is there. Now sit down!"_

"_Please don't hurt me!"_ he sobbed. But Nakuma remained indifferent to his pleas. With a blank expression she gave a short nod to the space behind him.

Suddenly two pairs of strong arms captured him from behind. He screamed. _"No! Please! I'm not lying! He's sitting right next to me! He's right there! Don't hurt me, no!" _

The more he struggled the more the arms hurt him as they insistently dragged him against the dayroom floor. His cries echoed across the void of white tiles, but on the other side, Nakuma did not even blink. The last he saw was her face against the white wall on the far side of the dayroom. They merged as one, and he saw a thin line of blood spread over the wall as her red lips curved into a smile.

* * *

"Subaru-kun!"

"No…please! Don't hurt me!" the boy whimpered in his sleep.

Seishirou managed to fasten a hand around Subaru's shoulder as he thrashed on top of the sofa. "Subaru-kun, wake up!"

"NO!" Without warning, Subaru's eyelashes flew apart, revealing wild green orbs. Regardless of his recent blood loss, he struggled against Seishirou with ferocity that the assassin had never seen from his prey.

"Subaru-kun, you're having a bad dream. It's only a nightmare," he explained with a cool voice that masked his surprise at the situation.

Subaru's protests dissolved into exhausted panting, and when his eyes gazed up at Seishirou's, his body became weak and unresisting against the other man.

"Seishirou-san…?" He whispered in the same frail voice that he had used only hours before.

He studied Subaru with mild interest. "You were moaning and crying in your sleep."

Subaru's expression softened with remorse. "I'm so sorry…I woke you, didn't I, Seishirou-san?"

"I was never asleep," Seishirou remarked dismissively. It was becoming increasingly more difficult for him to fall asleep, an annoyance that was linked to Subaru himself. The last hour was spent twisting in bed with more confusion swimming through his mind than peace. "It must have been bad."

Subaru looked back up at him. "What?"

"Your dream. It sounded terrible."

"Yes, my dream…" A mosaic of expressions overcame Subaru's face. His eyebrows arched together in frustration, while his lips were parted and anxious to say something more. Instead an upset sigh left his mouth. "I…I can't remember it."

Seishirou watched Subaru's eyes gleam despondently and fought back his own frustrated sigh. It was becoming exhausting for him to handle Subaru's panic attacks, but the helpless look on the boy's face made it impossible for him to leave the room while keeping his kind persona intact. He let his hand wander from Subaru's shoulder down the sleeve of his pajamas. Carefully he grasped his forearm at the place where the bandages left off, and he lifted Subaru from the sofa.

Subaru hesitantly allowed himself to be placed into an unstable standing position against Seishirou. "Um…Seishirou-san?"

"Do you think you can walk?" Without waiting for him to answer, Seishirou moved toward the kitchen. Subaru followed him like a puppy taking its first wobbly steps. When he was little more than halfway across the living room, however, Subaru gasped and tripped forward into Seishirou's arms. A cute, confused look came over his face as Seishirou lifted him up and carried him the rest of the way to the kitchen table. It was truly a disappointment, Seishirou thought to himself, that he was unable to take greater advantage of Subaru when he was so weak.

After setting him in a seat at the table, Seishirou rummaged through a kitchen cabinet and set an unopened box of pocky in front of him. If he had been capable, Subaru would have paled further.

With a mischievous grin, Seishirou took a seat next to Subaru. "You never did eat this as I told you to. Although I suppose you had a very good excuse given the circumstances. But now I think you can use a snack."

Subaru uneasily watched Seishirou tear open the box. "Right now?"

"Unless you want to go back to sleep." Seishirou pointed the box in his direction. "But I don't think that you do."

Defeated, Subaru's bandaged hand took a strawberry-coated stick, but to Seishirou's surprise, he winced as he brought it to his mouth. He had barely taken a bite when his hand twitched in agony, and the pocky fell onto the table. Seishirou's grin faded when Subaru flinched a second time and brought his wounded hand to his chest. Apparently even the slightest movement of his hands now aggravated the gashes on Subaru's hands.

Seishirou sighed and picked up the fallen stick of pocky.

"Seishirou-san, I'm sorry, I'm so useless, I ca—mmf!" Subaru's eyes widened. Seishirou had stuffed the pocky halfway into his mouth.

"Don't apologize," interjected Seishirou as he picked up another stick of pocky. He firmly held it in front of Subaru's lips, noting that the boy's cheeks were turning the same faint pink color as the strawberry coating. "Dessert shouldn't be painful."

"I don't understand," he whispered. His eyes wavered between the pocky and Seishirou's amused expression. "Why are you helping me?"

"I thought I made that clear. You need to gain weight." He grinned. "And you look cute when you blush like that, Subaru-kun."

Subaru fidgeted in his seat. "N-no, that's not what I meant. I, I mean, why do all this for me? I've been so much trouble…I can't even walk or feed myself. But you're still so kind to me."

Seishirou carefully kept his smile in place and waved the stick of pocky in front of Subaru's mouth. "Is it so odd to care about someone?"

He stared at the table. "It is…because I'm really not someone. I-I'm no one, Seishirou-san. I'm worthless. And I've never mattered enough for anyone to do what you're doing for me."

Seishirou was the last one who could deny that Subaru was as vulnerable and dependent as a newborn, and had it been anyone but Subaru, he would have never bothered to care. He went to the trouble because Subaru was his and his for a reason. It was his _right_ to satisfy his curiosity when it came to his prey. _His prey. _But what if Subaru really was as worthless as he claimed? If it could be true then he would serve no purpose as the Sakurazukamori's prey, and there would be no satisfaction for Seishirou when he found the answers that he sought. Why then was he still working so tirelessly if it might not be for his own gratification?

He brought the stick of pocky down on the tip of Subaru's nose. "Enough of that. The night I found you, didn't I tell you that you weren't worthless? But if you keep saying those things, keep belittling yourself, you truly will be nothing. I chose to help you—and I don't waste my time on _nothing_."

Subaru gaped. "I-I'm sorr—"

"And quit apologizing." He watched Subaru fall silent and stare down at the table. The boy sat motionlessly, not daring to say another word. In such a state, Subaru looked pathetically small and frail. Seishirou stopped himself from sighing aloud with frustration and forced a smile back on his face.

"Do you want to know why I chose to help you?"

Subaru hesitantly lifted his head to meet Seishirou's gaze.

"It's because I find you interesting." Subaru was his prey because he was interesting, and Subaru would remain interesting because he was his prey. It was as simple as that. Ultimately, Seishirou could never accept the notion that Subaru would stop belonging to him. He would maintain his ownership of Subaru even if the boy lost all memory of it.

In a second attempt, he lifted the pocky to Subaru's mouth. "Now you really should eat this."

Despite the uncertainty still clouding his eyes, a small half-smile appeared on Subaru's face. "You think that I'm… interesting?"

He placed the pocky between Subaru's lips. "From this angle anyone would."

* * *

Two glass doors bearing the symbol of the auroboros entwined with the medical cross whirred apart as he confidently strolled into the lobby of Tokyo Mercy Hospital. As he passed over the marble tiles, he straightened out the wrinkles in his white lab coat. A mirror hanging on the far end of the waiting room revealed the reflection of a person he had not been in over a year.

Seishirou stood amidst the chaos of the lobby in his veterinarian's coat with a clumsy pair of glasses obscuring his eyes. As doctors and patients flitted past him, he focused on a nurses' station past the waiting room. He approached one of the nurses reading the horoscopes page of the newspaper with a frown on her face. Ignoring her bad mood, Seishirou leaned against the counter, remembering the words he had rehearsed a dozen times in his head.

"Um, hello there. I was just transferred from the university hospital. I'm a new resident, and—"

The woman did not look up from the newsprint. "Go to Central Check-in and ask for the Residency Director."

Seishirou shifted where he stood. "Well, yes, I already did that, and I received a round of patients. But it seems I misplaced the front sheet of the file with the first patient's name." To complete his act, he let his clipboard slip from his fingers. He scrambled to the floor and reappeared over the counter with sheepish smile on his face.

To his pleasure, the nurse sighed with disgust, believing that she was facing another incompetent young doctor. She put down the newspaper, making a big show of the inconvenience it caused her and looked up at him with scathing dark eyes. "Do you at least have the patient number?"

"Oh, yes—just a moment!" He exclaimed while flipping through pages of meaningless documents. By now he had the number he read from Subaru's medical bracelet etched into his memory, but he pretended to slowly read it off a page on the clipboard. "Patient #500…121…57."

The nurse's long red fingernails danced over the keyboard. When she had finished entering the number, her finely penciled eyebrows arched at the computer screen. "Try again. There's no patient with that number."

For a moment he let his façade falter. "Perhaps you made a mistake."

She glared. "I think you made the mistake. The directory says there's never been a patient under that number."

His expression was unshakable. "Check again."

Her eyes rolled, and she opened her mouth to chastise this insolent new resident. Before delivering her remark, however, she caught the figure of a doctor stepping out of an elevator. "Perfect. Excuse me, Yamanata-sensei!" Seishirou glanced over his shoulder to find a pepper-haired doctor making his way over to the counter.

"Yamanata-sensei, could you please explain to this resident that the patient he's after doesn't exist?"

The doctor acknowledged Seishirou with a curt nod. "Well, tell me nurse, what's the patient's name?"

"No name, just a number. 50012157."

A change came over the doctor's face so quickly that if Seishirou had blinked he would have missed it. His eyes enlarged, and in that split moment, the color faded from his face. Before anyone else could notice, he forced a wide smile and patted Seishirou on the shoulder.

"Well, young man, I think that our nurse here is right. If that patient had been at this hospital, they would have been in my department—but I know for a fact that number was never assigned."

The doctor was a superb liar, but Seishirou could see that he had been shaken by the simple mention of Subaru's patient I.D. "Then there is no patient #50012157? No one at all?"

His lip twitched. "No one. I'm afraid you have the wrong number. Now if you'll excuse me."

"Thank you, sensei," replied Seishirou with a forced a bow as the doctor hurried away. When he turned back to the counter, the nurse had a smug smirk on her face.

"Let me guess," she began sarcastically while twirling a pen between her bony fingers. "It was that award-winning personality of yours that ticked off the residency director."

Remembering his disguise, he forced down his irritation at the woman. "Excuse me?"

"Your patient number—it began with 500. That's on the fifth floor, Yamanata-sensei's department. The director sends the residents that annoy him to attend to the medical needs of the patients on that level."

"And what is on the fifth floor?"

Her lips stretched into a grin. "The Mental Ward."

* * *

He curled up miserably in the suffocating closeness of the locked room. His arms had been fixed to his chest by a strange white jacket that was fastened so tightly that he could barely breathe. He felt so restrained, so small within the room that he might disappear from it without knowing. Only the tears that fell from his eyes, those painful, hot tears, gave him any indication that he was still there and still suffering. This gave him no comfort; every moment that he dared to look up, the walls, the ceiling and even the floor bulged voraciously at him. The whole room was surprisingly soft, but scratchy against his skin. With each new little scratch, he felt more frightened and more alone.

He did not know how he had arrived at this place or what it was. He simply drifted through the hours in daze, eating and sleeping as he was told. He had felt little for as long as he could remember, but in the dayroom he had been terrified of that woman. That terror had ignited thoughts which frightened him further, thoughts of running away from these sterile and uncomfortable rooms without knowing where he would go once he did so. His fears aside, he knew that he wanted nothing more than to leave this punishing cell of a room.

He jumped at a sudden creaking sound of the door opening, but by the time he had looked up, the door had already been slammed shut and bolted. What had changed was that he was no longer the only person in the room, and this gave him completely over to dread. Gazing straight down at him was the man from the dayroom. He scrambled to his feet and staggered away, only to discover that his back was already against the wall. _"Y-you…!"_ he exclaimed.

"_Hush!"_ growled the man. _"They may be listening!"_

The last circumstance he wanted was to be facing the man who was largely responsible for sending him to this prison. However, as he reluctantly glanced at him, he found that the man's expression had changed from what he saw before. The muscles of his face had smoothed from their contorted positions, revealing a young man in place of a maniac. He was several years older, although nearly skeletal in his white robe with unkempt black hair sweeping his shoulders. The man shot him a hard look with his large black eyes as he looked about to make sure it was safe to speak.

"_How…how did you get in here?"_ he whispered to the man.

"_You'll learn that it's painfully simple to get in here. Getting out—now that's next to impossible,"_ answered the man with an academic inflection in his voice. When he gave no reply, the man wobbled side to side as if testing the strength of the straightjacket that he, too, wore. _"They throw me in this rat cage every morning."_

Still distrustful of the newcomer, he remained in a guarded silence. The man frowned at this. _"Are you going to say something, or did I just purposely get thrown in here for nothing?"_

"_I don't want to talk,"_ he replied sulkily. _"When I listened to you last time they put me here."_

The man let out a dry laugh. _"Fact is, they put anyone in here who listens to me—if anyone ever did. You happen to be the first. That bitch nurse Nakuma's out to get me. Used to be that we'd fight daily, and believe me, she _fought_. Now she pretends I don't exist and if anyone says different, they're in trouble. So you see, I'm __**no one**_. _That's what they like to do. Change reality, pretend, and enforce dirty lies."_

He hesitated before looking at him. _"…what you said. The things they do…"_

The man grinned. _"You better believe it's all true. Half the things they've done to me, the other half, I see. Take the walls, for example. Not these ones, the ones outside. The pure white ones. What do you think when you look at 'em?"_

"_Nothing."_

"_Exactly! Nothing, nothing at all! That's what they do—they suck away all the thoughts you have until you're some stupid bastard doing what they tell you. But it's not just your thoughts that they take, it's your soul. They break your will."_

He wanted to widen the distance between them, but he remained trapped while the man continued to approach.

"_You seem no different from those brainless peons out there. But then again, you were brave enough to listen to me when no one else does. So I've decided to help you." _

He stared into the man's deep black eyes, wondering how any ordinary person could be so crazed and sincere in the same breath. _"What…are you?"_

"What_ am I? I'm a person, you stupid bastard! My name's Keijiro, and that's all you need to know. Now do you want my help or not? It's not like I go outta my way every morning for one of you fools!"_

He hesitated, even with Keijiro's eyes anxiously probing his. He had heard the word 'help' from the woman, and it had struck fear into the bottom of his stomach. Now the man was offering the same thing, but he felt somehow calmed by his wild stare. If it meant that this man's idea of "help" would shield him from the nurse's wrath, he realized that he would accede to his every whim. Before he could take it back, he nodded his head.

Keijiro's mouth curved into a grin. _"Good. Now move."_

"_Wha-what?"_

Despite how restrained his arms were by the jacket, Keijiro bumped him out of the way. _"Move. You're in my corner,"_ he remarked while curling into a fetal position in the corner.

He watched as the man settled before he also curled himself against the wall. To his relief, he said nothing more and silence blanketed the room. Minutes of it lulled him into sleep next to the madman in his locked and padded cell.


	6. Monsters

Well after another eternity I have another chapter to add! I thought I would have more time during my break from college, but damn…life just likes to kick my ass…

Warnings for graphic violence and psychologically twisted scenes in this chapter. It's definitely a more Seishirou-centric chapter, so I put some amount of effort into this to make it disturbing. You've all been warned! And with that, enjoy the chapter!

_**I love all my reviewers!!**_

_**recipe for insanity:**__ Hooray for glee! And my favorite pocky has to be the chocolate-banana flavored. Don't ask me why…it's just frickin' delicious._

_**laustic:**__ Sometimes I get so caught up writing that I wonder if I'm portraying the characters in a believable way. I'm so glad that I seem to have Seishirou right! _

_**kingleby:**__ That's the fun part about mystery stories! You never know where they go. In any case I hope I keep it entertaining._

_**Ruth:**__ I wouldn't discontinue this fic for anything! And One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest…it's been like seven years since I read that one—definitely a big source of inspiration. I'm happy that you like it!_

_**Anime Yaoi Lover:**__ Sorry I can't update any faster…college is evil like that. But thank you for taking such an interest in the storyline. I definitely will finish this story, no matter how long it takes!_

_**Vyersdra:**__ I enjoy writing this story because I get to put a twist on a common idea in the X/1999, TB fandom. I'll be sure to carry this on!_

_**Lady Geuna**__**:**__ Drama, drama drama! __It'll be several chapters before I clarify how he escapes and reaches the point in the story with Seishirou. It's all part of the mystery, and me being an evil person._

* * *

**The Hall of Broken Mirrors**

**VI. Monsters**

More than half a dozen cigarette filters lined the sizable mound of ash in the glass ashtray. For the most part they remained forgotten along with the half-opened books and manuscripts that also cluttered the desk as Seishirou vacantly stared up at the clock ticking away on the wall.

_Mental Ward._

He unconsciously mouthed the words each time that the thought repeated itself through his head. _Mental ward, mental ward, mental ward. _ It pushed through him like tiny ripples that were obstinately guiding him further away from solid ground. Every time he thought he had come closer to understanding what had broken his prey, he found himself even more confounded.

Sumeragi Subaru had been many things—foolishly optimistic, innocent, terminally naïve—but insane was not among them. And the unwitting boy he kept locked up in his apartment was no different. More than a year may have passed between them, and Subaru had indeed suffered changes, but Seishirou was certain that he knew his prey's mental state well enough to exclude this possibility.

But Seishirou had not known that Subaru was living on the streets.

He had not known that Subaru suffered an unexplainable loss of memory.

He had not known that Subaru could bleed like that from his hands and eyes.

There were a lot of things that Seishirou had not known and even more that was still left in the dark. He had read books on clinical observations for patients suffering from amnesia. Its victims had lost years, even decades of their lives, but still retained memories of their distant past. Subaru had suffered the opposite; his past had been completely obliterated, but he was able to remember the last few weeks of his life. Furthermore, he had come to realize the great loss he had endured, while those with retrograde amnesia rarely realized it.

Even if Subaru was mentally ill, how did a renowned onmyouji, the Sumeragi No Chou, end up in such a desolate place as the Tokyo Mercy Hospital Mental Ward? And more importantly, how did he escape? Seishirou clearly remembered the startled look that came over that doctor's face when he merely mentioned the number written on Subaru's medical bracelet. It was obvious that Subaru had never officially left the hospital if its staff were taking measures to deny that he even existed. Nevertheless, he doubted that the same helpless person that he found in the snow was capable of escaping on his own.

If he ignored these inconsistencies, it was almost possible for him to see Subaru curled up in a corner of the mental ward, wondering despondently who or what he was. But none of this wild speculation could even come close to explaining the terrible scars on his hands or the numerous attacks which provoked them. It was too difficult to believe that Subaru's loss of memory and his physical suffering were the result of two different causes that were not directly related.

A low, mechanical hum interjected while Seishirou was halfway through the last cigarette in his pack. As the fax machine urgently blinked at him with a bright red light, a piece of paper inched onto the tray. Seishirou left his chair. His legs were unnaturally stiff from hours of sitting hunched over useless texts, but he was hardly relieved when he approached the fax machine. On the contrary, a fax now guaranteed that he would have a job tonight, which was both unexpected and inopportune. Nonetheless, he snatched the paper from the tray while it was still warm with fresh ink.

His target was a female revolutionary who would lead people to attack the subway system if she was left alive. It was a common and somewhat tiring reason to assassinate someone—"for the stability of the government" he would kill. At the bottom of the paper there was the name of a street, but his target's alias was omitted. The words "WHITE ROSES" had been printed, which must have been all that was known about the victim's identity.

Seishirou replaced the paper on the fax tray. Knowing that tonight's job would require some effort on his part and that he still had other tasks to accomplish today, he exited the office.

He had only taken a few steps down the hallway when he heard a hard crash. A transparent bottle of antiseptic rolled from the half-open bathroom door. Not far behind it, Subaru emerged crawling on his hands and knees. The bandages on his hands had been loosened, and a strand of white gauze trailed from his left wrist as he scrambled after the bottle. It came to a halt a meter in front of the place where Seishirou stood. With a frustrated sigh, Subaru caught the bottle, only to jump when he noticed the older man smiling over him.

"Seishirou-san! I'm sorry, did I disturb you?" he cried.

"Not at all," he replied. Seishirou glanced at the unfastened wrappings on Subaru's hands. "Is it time to change your bandages?"

"Um, yes…" Subaru rose from the floor clutching the antiseptic to his chest. With his free hand, he absentmindedly tugged at a loosened bandage. He was startled once again when Seishirou placed a hand against the small of his of his back to lead him back into the lit bathroom. "Seishirou-san," he protested, "you don't need to do this again. I can change them myself."

"But at the cost of how many bottles of antiseptic?" He remarked, noting that the bottle cupped in Subaru's wrapped hands was cracked at the top.

Subaru looked down at the chipped bottle with guilt. While he was distracted, Seishirou wrapped his arms around him, and ignoring the boy's yelp, he lifted him onto the marble sink counter. Subaru's face had turned pink, and he squirmed uncomfortably on the table like many of the animals that Seishirou had examined as a veterinarian. Seishirou was amused to see that the confused glint in his prey's green eyes was no different than those of his former patients.

"Let's see how well your hands are healing," he said professionally while unwrapping one of the bandages from Subaru's wrist. "Are they still sore?"

Subaru only nodded, and focused his attention on the hand that was about to be undressed. Seishirou watched him flinch when a purplish red pentagram came into view. The wound had been a common enough sight for Seishirou in the past few days that he would have grown used to it if it had not lined the brands he placed on Subaru so perfectly.

While Seishirou was careful not to betray his continuing frustration with the wounds, Subaru could not hide his horrification at the scars. The boy winced as his second hand was also stripped of its bandages. "Doesn't it bother you?"

"What do you mean, Subaru-kun?" Seishirou applied the antiseptic to a cotton cloth, and firmly clasped Subaru's fingers.

He stifled a cry when the alcohol touched the edge of one of the pentagrams. "M-My hands. You must be disgusted by them."

"Does my right eye disgust you?"

"N-No! Not at all! I'd never be!"

"Then why would I be bothered with something that you can't help?"

There was no reply. Subaru averted his eyes while Seishirou continued torturing his hand with the antiseptic. Beyond the tightened muscles of his prey's shoulder, he caught sight of his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. His glass eye reflected the light in a way that gave it the false appearance of being alive, yet by now he had known better than to assume that it could see. His remaining eye broke away from his wounded reflection only to meet two perfectly bright green ones looking up at him.

"If you don't mind, that is…could you tell me how it happened?"

The sudden question caught him off guard. He should have thought of an answer to it days ago. It was, after all, something that Subaru would have asked him eventually.

"There was a woman," he answered carefully. "She had lost her mind because…the reason doesn't matter…but she had a knife, and in her state of insanity she rushed to attack this other person, who was willing to be her victim, if only to bring some comfort to her." He remoistened the cloth with more antiseptic and pressed it to Subaru's other hand. "I interfered."

Subaru cringed at the new round of antiseptic, yet his eyebrows remained creased together in sympathy long after the initial sting. "You sacrificed yourself, instead."

He shrugged. "Not for her benefit. But yes, in a manner of speaking."

"You could have died!" cried Subaru,

"I didn't."

Subaru glanced down at his exposed hands. "This person, the one that you saved from the woman…they must have been special to you."

Seishirou had been searching for a fresh roll of bandages when he heard Subaru say those words. If it had been appropriate, he would have laughed at the irony of the situation. Smiling, he drew closer and lightly pressed his thumb at the bottom of Subaru's chin until their eyes were centimeters apart.

"The truth?" he whispered as his thumb shifted up to the very edge of the boy's bottom lip. He was very enticing in that moment with his face turning a darker shade of red and his beautiful green eyes enlarging. Seishirou watched himself smile in those eyes. "I felt nothing for that person at all."

He withdrew and found the roll of clean bandages. Subaru gazed at him in astonishment. "But…you risked and sacrificed so much to help that person. You felt n-nothing?"

"As much as one would feel for an object lying in the street," he answered while wrapping up Subaru's first hand.

When he next looked in Subaru's direction, Seishirou was surprised to find that the boy's eyes were glimmering with pain. It always intrigued him how sensitive Subaru was at heart, but why had such a conversation hurt him so much, especially since he had no recollection of what happened?

_An object lying in the street. _

_A person lying in the street._

_Ah._

He should have known better than to say something like that, or rather the kind and gentle Seishirou-san should have known better. The person that he truly was, the emotionless assassin, should have shut up and told Subaru a lie instead of letting his façade slip like that. But now that the damage was done, he found himself unsure of how to act.

He slid his fingers through Subaru's hair and gently petted him. "Try not to let it worry you. It happened a long time ago."

* * *

He made a face at the plastic tray that sat before him on the dull face of the cafeteria table. The powdered eggs were watered beyond a solid shape and the sausages were discolored and stiff. The off-white slice of toast was stale and cold. The meal had remained untouched for over ten minutes since it had been unceremoniously thrust into his hands by an orderly.

"_You know, you don't really have to eat,"_ remarked Keijiro from his right side. He sat backwards on the plastic chair watching him debate whether or not to consume his breakfast.

"_But…if I don't eat it, I'll be hungry later…"_ he protested weakly.

Keijiro rolled his eyes. _"No. You weren't listening. You don't __**have**__ to eat."_

"_What?"_

"_You don't need to eat at all. You only think you do."_ The man sighed heavily. _"You really don't know anything, do you, Subaru? Subaru, that's your name, isn't it?"_

"_It's what my bracelet says, but—"_

"_Good. You don't completely trust the things they give you. That's a good first step. But you can't trust the food, either. They drug it, all of it. How else do you think that you feel so much pain and weakness after not eating it? It's withdrawal!"_

Keijiro paused, and scowled at his look of disbelief. _"You bastard! You think I'm crazy, don't you!"_

"_N-No!"_

"_Don't try to lie! It's all over your face! Maybe I should take my advice elsewhere!"_

"_No! Please don't!"_ he cried. Much of what this strange man had told him was frightening, but since their encounter in the dayroom, he found himself able to think and feel in a way that he could not remember. The last thing that he wanted was to return to that empty, catatonic state that had rendered him helpless against this place and all its evils. He obediently pushed away the disgusting meal. _"I'm sorry! I'll listen!"_

"_You'll listen to anything that I tell you."_

"_Yes! I promise!"_ he pled.

"_Alright then, I'll forgive you this time. Now pull back that tray."_

He gaped at him. _"Huh?"_

"_Just do it! And pick up two of those sausage links!"_

"_I—"_ he stopped short of questioning the stern command, reached for the plate. He inwardly cringed as his fingers fastened around the sausages; they were cold and rubbery like a cadaver's skin.

"_Now the toast. Take half of it." _

With his other hand he tore a piece from the stiff slice of bread. Regardless of the way the bread scraped against his fingers and the grease of the sausages made his palm slimy, he offered no complaint or question. He did not even dare move his hands without permission, especially because Keijiro was now carefully staring at the food clenched in his fists.

Keijiro's eyes were wide like those of a cat waiting for the right moment to pounce. Seconds passed in that miserable silence before he suddenly hissed, _"Put it all in your pockets. Quickly! Before they see!"_ His head tilted in the direction of the two orderlies supervising the cafeteria. One had been grumbling over a pool of vomit while the other was briskly cleaning the face of the patient who had produced it.

With a disgusted whimper, he obeyed, and stuffed half of his breakfast into his right pocket. The pants he wore were of a thin layer of cotton, and he could feel the sausages brushing against his hip like hard fingers.

"_Why?"_ he whispered to Keijiro when he was offered no further direction, _"I thought that I didn't need to eat any of it…"_

"_But you don't want them to know that you know that you don't need it." _Keijiro trailed away when an orderly walked up to the table. As the tray was collected, he received a cold stare, and his breath caught in fear that the orderly knew that he had not eaten a bite. But then the eyes on him turned away, and the man carried off the tray with those of the other patients.

He turned to Keijiro who had not moved while the orderly had conducted his business. As if the man was still within an earshot, Keijiro lowered his voice. _"When they force you into a line out of this room, stuff that crap into the first trashcan you see. But you can't let them know what you're doing! As long as they think you're eating what they give you, you'll be safe."_

"_Safe from what?" _

"_Safe from tasting your own bile coming up as they force that drugged mass of shit down your throat with a metal tube! Get it now, or do you have any more stupid questions?"_

He violently shook his head, and kept silent until he was herded out of the cafeteria by the orderlies. He threw away what remained of the breakfast, and hurried down the white hallway with an empty stomach and shaking hands.

* * *

The dampened sidewalk responded with an irritable _crunch _with every other step that Seishirou took. Salt had been littered across the concrete to guard against ice so there was little that he could do to avoid it. However, years of careful training had taught him to become one with the darkness as he prowled for his victim. And even though there was not a pedestrian to be seen in this quiet residential avenue, there were habits that a Sakurazukamori should never break.

After deciding to abandon the noisy sidewalk for the street, Seishirou reviewed the address that was partially given to him in the fax. _2-11-xx, Omori, Ota-ku_. He had found the block, but there were dozens of apartments stacked down the road, and only the cryptic hint, _white roses_, distinguished the home of his victim. Seishirou did not doubt that the information on the fax had been provided by a yumemi. He detested it whenever a target was named by a dreamseer; their instructions were always so damn vague. He was beginning to believe that _white roses_ might mean something more abstract when his eye caught a cluster of sinewy shadows hedging a window several meters down the road.

When he drew closer, he recognized the shadows as shriveled buds that had been destroyed by the cold. In the distant glow of a bronze street light, they were mostly black with petals folded into messy spirals. One disintegrated under the touch of his glove, revealing a lighter, gray-colored flower beneath. He smiled to himself; had the cold not ravaged them, these withered flowers would have been plump red—and white—roses.

The locked front door posed no challenge to him. A simple spell forced it to quietly give way under the push of his hand. He stepped into a cluttered hallway that had been illuminated by a plastic, cat-shaped nightlight. As he paused to admire it, a trembling voice sounded from the end of the corridor.

"Who is that? Is someone there?" the voice of a middle-aged man cried. Seishirou smiled at the cat nightlight, and pulled off the glove on his right hand. A shadow emerged from the other end of the hall. "Is that you, Yuna? Hel—"

The sentence was punctuated by a sharp cry as Seishirou buried his hand into the man's left lung. His fingers almost burned with the heat of the man's blood engulfing them. He could feel it pulsing down his wrist as the man's dark eyes bulged with disbelief. His victim's dry lips opened, but only a surrendering wheeze left his mouth. Then the pulsing of blood on his hand stopped.

"You bastard! You killed him! _Monster!_"

Seishirou glanced over his shoulder just in time to catch the wild gaze of a woman, the supposed terrorist he had been sent here to kill. Her bony arms swung an aluminum baseball bat in his direction. Before the weapon came within centimeters of his shoulder, Seishirou whipped around with his hand still lodged deep inside of the man's chest. The bat collided with the neck of the victim. The dead man's collarbone absorbed the blow with a brittle crack, and the woman shook at the sight of her gored husband.

Before she could recollect her senses, Seishirou plunged the rest of his arm through the chest cavity of his first victim. His fingers broke through the back of the man and penetrated the woman's skin as though it were nothing more than a sheet of tissue paper. She gave a shrill scream that degraded within seconds to an unforgiving moan. Then the hallway was dead silent.

He removed his arm from the two bodies and let them fall onto the tile floor with a wet _thud_. He stepped over the pool of blood collecting on the floor, and with a last glance at the now-bloodied cat nightlight, he walked around the corner into the kitchen.

The water from the kitchen sink was ice cold, but effective. He entertained himself by watching the blood that had once coated his forearm swirl down the drain.

"Monster," Seishirou said aloud. He soundlessly laughed at the word. It had been a while since a victim called him that. There were all kinds of monsters in the world—at least he was the kind that made no attempt to hide what he was.

Until it came to Subaru. But that was a special case because it was Seishirou's true nature that would have made it impossible to keep the boy close. He knew this well from two years ago at the end of their bet. He saw how deliciously horrified Subaru had been with his true identity then, and even now. Earlier that afternoon he had let himself slip just a little bit, and—the look in Subaru's eyes…

Seishirou shook away the thought and sternly reminded himself that he was still in the home of his victim. The job was not yet finished. The sink water now ran clear under his pristine hand. He shut off the water, and noticed that to his right the refrigerator door had been left open. As soon as he closed it, Seishirou found himself facing a large picture of Hello Kitty that had been scribbled over with purple and green crayons. Under the picture he read "BY YUNA" in large letters.

"Tou-san, Kaa-san?" called a sleepy voice behind him. Seishirou turned around. A small girl not more than five years old stared up at him with big, curious eyes. Her hair was kept in messy pigtails with small white-beaded barrettes, and hanging from her hand was a stuffed bear. The bear swung from her arm as she took a wobbly step from a hallway opposite of the one that contained the bodies of her parents.

"I can't sleep."

* * *

The orderlies had put him back into the dismally white dayroom where he and everyone else were left to their own devices of entertainment. Some of the patients had gathered around a glowing television where they were ceaselessly laughing at a politician's address. Others were playing a card game whose rules were made on a whim and then forgotten causing several incidents that required the orderlies to separate the men.

He remained isolated from them, as always, but unlike before when he was shunned from the groups it was Keijiro's strict order that he stay put in a corner. The isolation and the silence were nothing new to him; before he had encountered Keijiro he would spend hours and days drifting in emptiness. But he now found it unbearable, and he itched to move about in spite of his orders. Soon after the first hour had passed, Keijiro suddenly rose and motioned for him to follow suit. When he had done so, the other man had already crept halfway across the dayroom with his body pressed against the wall.

"_Hurry up! We only have a few moments to do this!"_

"_To do what?"_

"_Get out of here before they notice!"_ It was then that he realized that "they" were nowhere to be found in the room. The nurses and the orderlies had vanished at some point while he was curled up in that corner.

"_Everyday around this time the nurses switch shifts. It takes 'em about fifteen minutes, and they leave the room to those dumbass orderlies. And what do they do? Sneak off for a cigarette on the roof. This is our chance, so keep crawling and follow me!"_

"_Why are we crawling?"_ he queried.

Keijiro pointed to the camcorder angled at the ceiling. _"That's why. They think it's all right to leave us in here. After all, the person monitoring the damn camera will see if something goes wrong. We can't do anything as long as the camera's on us!"_

He only half listened to the other man's angry rant as he crawled across the floor to the bewilderment of his fellow patients. When he at last neared the door, he pulled himself up from his sore knees, and was shocked to find Keijiro impatiently holding the door open.

"_You—you could just open it?"_

"_Not 'just.' What do you think, those orderlies are complete morons? They lock the door, alright, but they didn't expect me to learn how to open it up after months of watching! Now come on, we only have a little time left before they realize we're gone!" _

It was the first time that he did something without hesitating. With a wide smile, Keijiro guided him down the hallway. _"Today, I'm going to teach you one of the most important lessons about this hellhole. Nothing, and I mean _nothing_ is what they tell you!"_

"_Like eating, you mean."_

"_Not just that. They say orderlies and nurses help you. Truth is they're the meanest bastards out there! They say that those walls are just that—walls. But you and I know they're more sinister than that. They say that we're prisoners here because we're sick." _Keijiro halted and set his black eyes on him. _"Do you feel ill at all?"_

Before he could answer, Keijiro lifted a pale arm in the direction of a white door camouflaged against the blank wall. _"Take a good look at that. They call it a utility closet. But if you think it is, you're an idiot. They just say that to hide what really lives in there."_

"_What?"_ he whispered.

"_Monsters. They keep monsters there—the broken people, things that scream behind the walls, things so tormented that they'll rip us apart if they get the chance. If we stay here as long as they have, that's what the man in white will make us into. Only we don't realize that's what we're becoming, those broken people, until it's too late. That's why it's so important you know what they're doing now."_

"_The man in white?" _

Keijiro abruptly froze as murmurs carried from around the corner of the corridor. _"Ssh. Come with me, stay low."_

They crept to the corner, where the voices were distinct enough to understand. _"…even if he is a new arrival. And it was not the only incident. All week he's been catatonic, very antisocial, won't cooperate with the other nurses…"_

At Keijiro's beckoning, he found the courage to peak around the corner. Immediately, he felt the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. The first thing he saw were dark red lips curved into a determined frown and dark eyes that blazed before a man with graying hair in a long, white jacket.

"_Has he spoken to anyone since the episode?"_ queried the man.

Nakuma folded her arms. _"The new girl, Katashi-chan tells me he spoke. But nothing at all coherent. She's too green; thinks the boy will make a full recovery if we try."_

As her strident voice reverberated off the plain white walls, he could feel something inside of him sink lower as though he were drowning from the inside out. His shoulders jumped when he felt the sleeve of his shirt being tugged backwards by Keijiro.

"_We should go,"_ Keijiro whispered.

But he remained in place, watching as the man in white adjusted a metal clipboard in his arms and hum thoughtfully. _"From what I understand our patient underwent a psychotic break before we received him. When I initially examined him, I came to the same conclusion_**_."_**

He felt Keijiro pull more urgently on his shirt this time. _"We need to leave now!"_ he hissed.

"_I'd like to see him again,"_ the man in white continued, _"but I'm afraid I'll be away for the rest of the week for a conference in Kyoto. In the meantime, see that his Chlorpromazine dosage is doubled and keep a sharp eye for any changes. Understood?"_

"_Yes, Sensei,"_ was Nakuma's mechanical answer. _"I'll instruct the others to do the same. A new shift has just begun so if you'll excuse me…"_

The nurse broke her gaze with the doctor and began walking directly toward him. His first instinct was to stand up and run as Keijiro had previously urged him, but his legs would not move. They moved closer, and he helplessly looked behind him for Keijiro, but he was nowhere in sight. In desperation, he threw all his weight backwards, but in his precarious crouching position, this only made him lose his balance.

He fell onto the floor under two sets of surprised eyes. He shivered as their shadows descended over him.

"_Subaru-san!"_

_

* * *

_

"You're silly, Onii-chan!" giggled the little girl as she skipped at Seishirou's heels. He peaked over his shoulder at her. The wind that rustled in the dead trees of the park carried over them. The lapels of her bright pink coat fluttered in the gust along with the two dark wisps of hair kept in pigtails. She made a face and shivered against the cold, but nevertheless brought the chocolate ice cream cone in her hand to her lips.

He smirked and copied her movements with his own ice cream. "And why am I silly?"

She swung her stuffed bear with her free hand. "Because Kaa-san says that only silly people eat ice cream when it's cold out. That's why she never let me that one time when I was playing with Kuma-kun outside and—"

"Well," he interjected. "Then you must be extra silly, because that is your second ice cream." He turned back around, and continued down the lumpy path through the park. It would not be long until this night was over. He only had to resolve this loose end with the child, and his job would be completed. Then he could return to his apartment and matters that worth thinking about. He would resume playing with his innocent prey, his Subaru, and…

…And that was the second time he found himself thinking about Subaru during a job. This had not happened before, even in the year of their bet. Why was he finding himself so distracted?

"Onii-chan!" The little girl broke him out of his trail of thought with an impatient whine. "Are we almost there? I'm getting cold!"

"Yes," he replied. "We're very close now. Just a little further." The park was growing darker as they drew farther away from the city lights. Ahead the boughs of skeletal trees opened around them like the jaws of a starved predator. Past them he could see the faint outline of the tree that stood apart from them all, waiting.

"Aren't you cold, too, Onii-chan?" she chirped behind him.

Seishirou smiled to himself. "Of course. But it doesn't bother me anymore." There was no reason to think about it or even look at her. It did not matter that she was young and scared and had cried when he took her from her house, just as it did not matter when her dead mother had called him a monster. Like her parents, this orphaned child was prey. She had seen him in the kitchen with the bodies only meters away. There was no question about what he ought to do.

As they cleared the top of the hill the little girl gasped with joy and pulled on his overcoat. "Onii-chan! Look! Look! That tree's got sakura in full bloom! It's so pretty! I've never seen sakura in the winter before!" She scurried past him for the tree, where she laughed and spun around. She abandoned her half-eaten ice cream cone to dance with her bear and throw tiny fistfuls of the fallen blossoms into the air.

When Seishirou had strolled up to the tree, she was already panting breathlessly. Her pigtails were even more disheveled with the white-bead barrettes barely holding them together. "This is so neat, Onii-chan! I wish Kaa-san and Tou-san were here to see the sakura!"

"Tell me," Seishirou replied with a whisper. "Would you like to be with them?"

"Yes! I miss Kaa-san and Tou-san!" She held up her stuffed bear. "And so does Kuma-kun! I want them!"

"More than anything?" He asked.

"More than anything!" she cried back.

Seishirou knelt at the level of her moist eyes. "Then you're in luck. Because I happen to be a magician, and I can take you to them."

"Re-really!? I can go where Kaa-san and Tou-san are!?"

"Yes, really." He stretched out a gloved hand over her head. "So let's fix your hair so they'll be surprised how pretty you are when you see them." He pulled out one of the white barrettes and straightened out her disheveled pigtail. Suddenly he froze as he was replacing the small hairclip. All this time he had assumed with his decreased eyesight that the barrette had a round white bead attached to it. But now that it was in his hand and he could see it up close…

"They're white roses!" explained the girl. "Kaa-san gave them to me. She says that they're my special flower. She'll be so happy to see that I'm still wearing them!"

He did not reply right away. "Are you ready to go?"

"Yep! But Onii-chan…Kuma-kun won't be able to come with me, huh?" Her eyes sparkled with insight that surprised Seishirou. For a moment he could not answer as she thrust the stuffed bear to his face. "So will you find him a home?"

"I promise." The same smile remained on his lips, although beneath it he was unsure if anything about this child was as it seemed. He placed the stuffed bear to his side, and slid his left hand over her back. "Now just close your eyes, and slowly count to three. When you finish, you'll be with your parents."

Her thick eyelashes fluttered together and her forehead wrinkled with concentration. "Alright. One…"

Seishirou brushed his right hand against her collarbone. At the base of his palm he could feel the defiant tapping of her little heart against her chest.

"Two…"

He glanced at her white barrettes. _White roses_. Given time, this girl would grow into a woman. She would lose her innocence and become a terrorist. She would bomb subway cars, kill hundreds and send the city into chaos. It was his duty to be the monster that killed other monsters. And this, along with everything else, did not matter.

"Three."

A dry crack sounded as the wind rattled through the sakura tree and stirred the blossoms from their branches. The sakura swept over them, and in the brief moment they clouded his vision, Seishirou saw a little boy in place of the girl. A little boy with enormous green eyes and the appearance of a delicate doll dressed in a white shikifuku. Seishirou's breath caught, and he stared harder at the figure through the storm of sakura just to catch the tiniest glimpse of the child he thought he saw.

The sakura flew up and away into darkness, and the image of the little boy vanished. Instead, Seishirou found himself staring at the girl's contorted expression, as he should have been. The last sounds of the wind faded like a dying breath, carrying away the agonized expression in her eyes. Then she was still.

He removed his hand from her broken neck, and the sakura blossoms hanging from the tree dissolved from sight until only a skeletal husk of bark remained. His maboroshi melted away leaving him alone with the dead child under the barren tree. Without a second look at the girl, he stood with the stuffed teddy bear secure in his arms. On the way home, the corpses of leaves crunched under his shoes.

* * *

Seishirou pushed the front door open. He found Subaru fast asleep on the sofa with the television light flickering across the living room. As he watched shadows and light play over Subaru's pale face, he could hear the familiar voice of a newswoman.

"…an hour since a concerned neighbor called the authorities about shouting in the adjacent apartment. Police have so far made no official comment on the disappearance and are canvassing the area."

Subaru slept like a young child. His arms were wrapped tightly around his pillow and his knees were drawn to his waist. The blanket was draped halfway over his legs and touched the floor as though it had been disturbed by many episodes of tossing and turning. When Seishirou had stepped close enough to examine the sleeping boy's face, he saw that Subaru's eyebrows were pushed together and a small frown was fixed over his pink lips. He must have been having another nightmare. How cute.

The newswoman's voice became more somber. "This just in…we are devastated to report that the body of Omakaski Yuna has been found. Officials have declined to comment, but an outside source has confirmed that the five-year old girl was discovered in Ueno Park with a broken neck. We will bring you more information as it comes…"

Seishirou cut off the newswoman by pressing the mute button on the remote control. As silently as he could, he pulled the ottoman close to the sofa and seated himself so that his shadow fell over Subaru. In one arm, Seishirou held the stuffed bear that had been entrusted to him by his latest victim. He had been looking forward to watching Subaru cuddle innocently with this toy, unaware of its dark origins. Yet now that he held the bear in view of the boy, such an image almost felt disquieting. He was at a loss to explain it, but Seishirou wanted the stuffed animal to be nowhere near Subaru, and as he came to realize this, he felt the same twinge of irritation that had been plaguing him since the New Year return in full force.

He dropped the bear to the wooden floor, and with his free hand, Seishirou let his fingers drift upward along a fold in Subaru's pajamas until they reached his collarbone. His hand could still remember the impact of the little girl's bones as they snapped against it. He kept it there on Subaru, wondering if he would feel any difference if he were to break his neck as well.

He had claimed Subaru as his prey when he was not much older than that dead girl. Both she and Subaru were his victims; they were just as innocent. They could not have been any different. But if that was true, then tonight her body would have been joining Subaru's bones under the sakura. Instead Subaru was here, sleeping on his sofa. He could feel his warmth under his palm.

It was because Subaru _was_ different from that child. He meant something more, something greater than a source of entertainment or intrigue. It was something that Seishirou did not understand, but that same _something_ kept his hand from crushing the boy's throat. Why was that? Why had he allowed all this time to pass without killing him? Why had he sacrificed his eye while shielding Subaru that day in the hospital?

His mind drifted back to their conversation hours ago.

_This person…they must have been special to you._

His hand migrated from Subaru's neck to his soft, dark hair, and just as he had that afternoon, he began petting him. Subaru was different, but back then and now, Seishirou did not feel anything stirring in his heart. He felt nothing, just as he was meant to feel.

_You felt nothing!?_

Seishirou kept fingers entwined in Subaru's hair.

_As much as one would feel for an object lying in the street._

_As much as one would feel for an object—_

Seishirou pressed his lips against Subaru's. He kissed the sleeping boy over and over again, each time his mouth moving deeper, searching for that _something_ that made it impossible for him to dispose of Subaru as he had hundreds of other prey. A soft, unconscious moan left Subaru, and the sound vibrated against Seishirou's lips, causing him to instinctively shudder.

He wanted Subaru. He wanted him to be his prey, his plaything, _his_. It had to be _want_ because it damn well could not have been an emotion that did this to him.

He pulled away from Subaru. The boy shifted a little, yet remained in a deep sleep. Seishirou sat there, feeling the warmth of his prey's lips fading from his. He assured himself that he felt no emotion, no tingling affection. There was nothing.

He felt nothing, and he smiled.


End file.
